There is a notable reason why so many men push away from the world of mental health. Men are often socially tailored to be overly attuned to focusing on productivity. And unfortunately this means that these men feel that they must achieve this by any means necessary. The means given to men are the tools of self-shaming, self-deprivation, and and self-hate. It is these tools that allow men to perform and get work done. And these tools are both incredibly effective and incredibly accessible to men due to a myriad of reasons. However the downsides of these being the primary tools in many men’s toolboxes is that it builds them into a difficult catch-22. You either succeed by hating yourself to make something happen or you fail and hate yourself because of the things you didn’t make happen.
With that noted, its no wonder why men have the issues they have. What must they do to function at the levels that society demands of them? They must medicate in some way, shape, or form. Drug addiction, excess anger expression, physical altercations, sex addiction, sexual violence, hate crimes, mass shootings, etc. all can come back to not just the results of social pressures that men are put under but also their lack of accessibility to more mental health tools. Why do we treat men’s mental health more in line with a medical disease model, only to be worked on after a problem is found, and not as a core-concept to be embraced and built upon?
While we have a plethora of mental health tools out there, they tend to be less accessible to men and often come far too late, missing the formative years of a man’s life. A man is given labels of lazy, irresponsible, or heartless. And while this can be true for a few, there tends to be missing any room for alternate labels like misunderstood, unheard, self-loathing, or abused. When these labels are given, it is only after they have had notable success and they have done something deplorable. Why is compassion for men publicly (and often privately) displayed only for successful men? Why are we directly teaching men that compassion is an award to be gained only after success has been reached?
This is not the only reality that has to be but this is the reality that is. Men have little practical choice but to engage self-scathing monologues to feel like they can earn their sense of self. And we must admit this is the demand of society and the failure of society - that we actively encourage men to hate themselves. Men do this to other men too yes, but it’s an all around problem. Places of personally centering and psychological decompressing/destressing for men are not readily available or at least socially difficult to access.
Where is the Brene Brown for men? Where is the masculinization of mental health? How can we find a way to engage the innate dignity of men to gain a sense of personal inspiration and not leverage self-hatred as a means to progress? Why aren’t we building a better narrative for men that is compassion-led or based on recognition of virtue? Why is the building of emotional vocabulary and emotional understanding one of our last priorities?
*Image by Erendira Tovar