Changing the Stigma: A Focus on Men’s Mental Health

Men’s Mental Health Month is observed every June. The month is used to raise awareness of men’s mental health and to reduce the stigma around men seeking help. Although we know that men and women are both affected by mental disorders, research and studies show that men might be less likely to seek care and that men are more likely to die by suicide than women. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, men are less likely to have received mental health treatment than women in the last year. Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that the suicide rate among American men is four times higher than that of women. Although there are encouraging signs that stigma around seeking mental health treatment is reducing overall, there are still indications that it is more difficult for men to reach out to others for the help that they might need.

At The Center for Integrative Counseling and Psychology, it is in our values to honor the role of faith in people’s lives. So, the focus on men’s mental health is not only a psychological matter, but a spiritual matter as well. Viewing men’s mental health through a psychological and spiritual lens allows us to ask questions from different perspectives, focusing on the whole person.

To explore men’s mental health, specifically raising questions as to why American men are less likely to seek treatment and more likely to die by suicide than women, we must examine the culture that many boys are raised in. Today, many boys and men still live with the messages that boys are not supposed to cry, boys are to be tough, to ‘man up’ and don’t be a sissy. While these phrases are often thrown around playfully, these phrases shape generations of men who are more easily angered and who are less likely to admit hurt and pain.

The spiritual lens, from a Christian perspective, can help us to consider how Jesus viewed both men and women; and to consider how Jesus’s teachings might shape our understanding of the whole self and what the path to wholeness and psychological healing might look like. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus, talking to his disciples, compares greatness to becoming like little children. Jesus indicates to his disciples that entering the kingdom of heaven requires change, and that change is childlike humility. Other descriptions and behaviors that describe child-likeness are vulnerability, openness, playfulness, a willingness to feel pain and to cry, and a willingness to ask for help.

So, how might our perspective change if we view Jesus’s words in the context of psychological and spiritual wholeness? What new meaning do we find if we were to ask questions about men’s mental health while thinking about Jesus’s words? How would we ask and answer the questions about why men seek less help and why men die by suicide a higher rate?

Maybe Jesus’s words teach us that men not only need to be more vulnerable, but they need more spaces to show vulnerability in; that men need to be more open, but need others to be open with; that men need to be willing to feel their hurt and pain, but need others in their lives that let them acknowledge their hurt and pain; that men be willing to ask others for help when they need it.
Maybe Jesus’s words teach us that it is ok for boys and men to cry.

To continue to address the mental health needs of men, we must continue to find ways to reduce the stigma around mental health treatment as a whole, but specifically around the treatment for men. We must continue to ask questions that break down destructive cultural norms and create open spaces for men to be the whole person that each was created to be.