I’m a men’s mental health expert – too many still suffer in silence

A little over 10 years ago, I was grappling with a deep mental health challenge. By the time I’d actually gone to see the doctor to get diagnosed, I’d neglected things for long enough that I was facing daily suicidal thoughts too. There’s a huge mental health part to this story: a lack of education, language and self-awareness, as well as my subsequent journey with recovery and therapy.

But there’s another part to this story, a deeper part: my sense of masculinity at the time. Because despite how desperately I was struggling and despite the fact that around me I had a loving family, a great group of friends and a supportive girlfriend, nobody knew what was happening. Why?

Because that’s what I believed men do, keep struggles locked away in a box called “silence”. It’s a crude equation, but I was willing to trade my own life in order to preserve this notion of masculine pride. To get better, to recover, and to still be here today, I had to not only work through the mental health side but I also had to almost entirely deconstruct and then rebuild my sense of what it means to be a man.

Let me be clear, this isn’t about criticising or shutting down parts of masculinity that many men find so valuable. I believe we have gone too far in some discourse in recent years, too quick to label things toxic and shut down many parts of masculinity that men enjoy or aspire to have.

But I do also strongly believe that we have made masculinity too rigid and narrow, a very specific version of it being passed from generation to generation like a hand-me-down. Among other things, this version of masculinity many of us have grown up with is one that champions emotional suppression, rather than expression.

Men are actively encouraged to avoid their natural, normal, human experiences and emotions. It was the main reason I almost ended up taking my own life. And I believe we’re seeing the result of this rigidity play out for hundreds of thousands of other men in all manner of ways across the globe, with the stats around suicide, premature death, addictions, loneliness, homelessness, crime and more, both stark and shocking.

It’s estimated that, on average, a man takes his own life every single minute of every single day somewhere around the globe, while 15 men under the age of 75 die prematurely every single hour in the UK. These are national and global scandals, figures that are as heartbreaking as they are shocking. And so this silent crisis has been brewing.

Many men are smiling on the surface but struggling underneath. Many support pathways aren’t built for men, and even if available, men have been conditioned out of utilising them for fear of being labelled “weak”. I’ve been working in the mental health space for almost a decade now and have seen these realities and challenges play out time and time again.

When interviewing dozens of guests for my book: Be A Man About It: Building A Healthier Idea Of Masculinity, the same issue kept cropping up time and time again. When men needed help the most, they chose silence. It’s time for us to have more frank and honest conversations about the things impacting men, because lives depend on it.

How have we got here?

It’s a complex web and not one where we can easily paint a line from A to B. There are biological factors at play that may create the foundations for men to naturally lean towards certain behaviours around the expression of emotions. However, there are huge cultural and systemic factors too, human-made issues that are keeping a lid on men’s experiences. Biology may set foundations but cultural norms build the rest of the structure, and that structure for men has been one focused on silence and suppression.

As a society, we haven’t focused enough in recent years on the problems facing men. There are clear and understandable reasons for this, the most obvious being the support and voice women and feminism have needed in righting historical inequality. But it has been this same historical inequality that has caused us to assume men are alright, that they don’t need support, because they’ve been at the top for so long.

Why more men take their own lives:

Suicide is highly complex and there are many potential factors involved as to why more men take their own lives. According to the Office for National Statistics, men are three times more likely than women to kill themselves.

Some of these include the fact that men tend to use more lethal suicide methods than women, and men are less likely to seek support for mental health issues. Alongside this, the cultural masculine norm of emotional suppression, rather than expression, itself carries with it a higher risk of suicide.

Importance of male friendships:

A wealth of scientific research confirms that humans are fundamentally social creatures, wired for strong social connections, which they depend on to survive. Cultural masculine norms have championed independence, which is important in some contexts, but the darker side to this is that it can bring a resistance to strong interpersonal connections with others.

Platonic bonds with other men are resisted in particular, which sadly often get labelled with homophobic slurs, with so many men avoiding vulnerability and depth in connections. Our cultural conditioning is at odds with our biological needs, and it’s driving many men to loneliness, mental health issues and, heartbreakingly, suicide. Humans need other humans, and men need other men.

Why men are reluctant to seek help:

NHS data consistently shows that women account for a higher percentage of GP attendance. This may be because women and girls develop a familiarity with medical settings from a younger age, where national screening programmes for women generally start around 25, whereas for men, these start much later, for some men as late as 65.

Strict cultural norms are also playing their part, where it can be seen as inherently unmasculine to be talking about our health or any issues with it. But with men at higher risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and premature death – we mustn’t put pride before our health.

• Be a Man About It: Building A Healthier Idea Of Masculinity, by George Bell (John Wiley & Sons, £20) is published on January 22