Recently, my girl friends and I have become deeply invested in the men’s mental health crisis. It’s a big topic of conversation, to the point where we’ve even begun sending articles back and forth (see a Harper’s Bazaar article by Melanie Hamlett, a woman). We ponder for hours over the seemingly elusive nature of men’s mental health: What are their friendships like? What do they talk about? Do they even know how to feel? These questions could just as easily be directed to an alien species as to almost half of the human population. We perceived men as emotionally unexpressive, uncomfortable with vulnerability, and stoic—but that answer felt unsatisfying. I grew disappointed with the amount of aimless speculation in our conversations. It is a big question: How can we improve men’s mental health? Searching for an answer, I decided to ask men.
Over the course of a month, I talked to seven Georgetown men, all of whom were sourced from friends of mine and whom I had never met. The plan was simple: the interviews would be anonymous and conversational, geared towards the topic of men’s mental health—however they wanted to interpret that.
It’s important to note that these men all identified as cisgender but came from diverse racial and sexual identities, which informed their responses. Additionally, their family structures also differed. Growing up, some had “traditionally masculine” father figures, while others came from single-mother households. Certainly, these backgrounds impacted how comfortable they were with their emotions, but all of them ultimately had to seek out spaces for vulnerability.
Of course, these experiences won’t ring true for all people who identify as men or women—gender is filtered by so many other aspects of identity and isn’t binary. My lived experiences and those of my interviewees are limited, but I hope this commentary reshapes the conversation around men’s mental health towards one that’s empathetic, complex, solution-oriented, and inclusive.
I opened every interview with the question, “How do you define mental health? How do you interact or take care of it every day?” On an individual level, most of the guys acknowledged their personal mental health as a critical consideration in their life. One student explained to me that he gauges the state of his mental health by determining whether his thoughts feel organized or scattered, and sees the process of reorganizing his thoughts as translating his “emotional brain” into his “rational brain” through methods like journaling and meditation. Others identified exercise as a way to decompress. While that may fulfill the classic image of the gym-bro, it is, in all seriousness, a great hobby to fall back on for managing anxiety. I was surprised with how many guys had direct tactics to process and care for their mental health, considering how we paint the men’s mental health crisis as stemming from their inability to understand emotions in the first place.
Most of these men had ways to deal with their mental health on a case-by-case basis, but caring for one’s mental health should not be an act of crisis management. As one interviewee said, he is only conscious of his mental health “the worse it is.” Therefore, it seems the crux of the problem is that taking care of one’s mental health is not seen as an everyday practice which requires strong relationships and communities to support. This is true for anyone, not just men.
My mental and emotional life has been shaped by the people around me, who are primarily women. It’s no secret that women tend to express emotional depth in nearly every conversation, from gossiping about boys to sharing our childhood trauma; we can approach gossip with an analytical lens worthy of a JSTOR article and actively seek out emotional complexities on a daily basis. Naturally, inviting those more profound conversations is a critical step in building our close relationships—and men do recognize this.
Nearly every single man I interviewed admitted that they felt more comfortable talking about their emotions with the women in their lives versus the men. As one guy simply put, “I just trust my friends who are women to have a better and more emotionally intelligent response.” And that’s not to say that the men I interviewed don’t have any emotionally intelligent men in their lives to talk to; they do. But even then, they note that the most emotionally intelligent women in their lives outpace the most expressive or emotionally mature men.
Consequently, the men’s mental health crisis not only impacts the men themselves, but also the women in their lives. The classic case would be the girlfriend who becomes a therapist for her boyfriend. And the men I interviewed didn’t attempt to deny this phenomenon, but rather, aimed to give it some context without justifying it. “I think with guys, if they have a girlfriend, that’s definitely their number one go-to for stuff like that,” one guy explained. “I think girls who have boyfriends—[he] still might not even be their number one [person to go to], and [even] if [he is], they have a close second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth option with their girlfriends.”
While I don’t believe that it’s healthy for one person to be a sole source of emotional support, the way men explained their gendered friendship dynamics offered me some clarity: everyone wants to talk to people that are open and understanding, and it just seems that most of those people end up being women. Personally, I can’t think of any guy friend that I would go to over a girl friend.
Inevitably, most of the guys I talked to primarily find themselves in male-dominated circles where the emotional dynamics completely flip. One interviewee put it this way: “I don’t think men and women’s innate capacity for emotional maturity is very different,” but instead there’s “a different rulebook that you play by when you’re making friends with guys than with girls.” There’s a critical difference between a lack of caring and different forms of caring. As mentioned, women tend to care more outwardly, constantly asking questions, checking in, welcoming emotional depth. In simplest terms, if they know a friend is going through something, the natural step would be to check in on them. For men, it’s different.
According to responses, men try to respect boundaries and prevent further discomfort for the other person by avoiding emotionally challenging conversations, which can be perceived as apathy towards someone’s situation when it’s not meant that way. When asked about how he would handle a friend coming to him with an emotional issue, one guy observed that most of the time, “you can tell they don’t really want to dig into it very much,” even when they are the ones to broach the subject. “I don’t know what I would do if a friend came to me like that. I would probably push a little bit. But then it’s like, you don’t want to push so much to where [you’re making them uncomfortable].” To men, the caring thing to do is to give people space, and that stems from a discomfort around discussing emotions openly.
You could spend forever tracing the roots of this discomfort. However, one thing to distinguish is that it is not inherent. Men, if given the proper space, want to express how they feel and listen to others do the same. Every single guy I interviewed expressed some interest—to varying degrees—in being able to open up with the people around them. However, men are wary of the mutually understood hesitation around emotions, and therefore don’t initiate emotionally challenging conversations so as to not cross people’s boundaries—even if they understand that doing so perpetuates expectations around masculinity and emotional expression. This mindset, though not intended to do harm, establishes a self-perpetuating cycle in which men who are struggling don’t open up and their friends don’t offer support, all in an effort to avoid causing the other unease. Ultimately, men are left in a dearth of spaces and communities where they can develop the emotional maturity to cross that line of discomfort.
This gap in the male social sphere has taken an insidious turn in recent years with the festering of incel culture. The topic of incels—an online community of men who blame and revile women for their lack of romantic success—came up organically in most of my conversations, because as much as we may want to cast them off as a fringe movement, incel culture is dangerously prominent. Many of the men I interviewed could quickly cite at least a couple guys they knew who expressed misogynistic rhetoric. And while these men should absolutely be condemned and held accountable for their beliefs, it’s worth understanding what brought them to that place. “I think that a lot of people do genuinely find some sort of community in it,” one guy suggested. “They feel mad at the world, and hear these other people that are mad at the world and think yeah, maybe I’m like that. Even if they really aren’t—they will try to mimic that as much as they can so that they can feel like they’re a part of something.”
Clearly, men lack some emotional support systems, which is detrimental to not only their mental well-being, but society’s well-being. This conversation isn’t new, but it usually stops here, which is why I ended every interview with the same question: “If you could suggest anything to improve the state of men’s mental health in the U.S., what would that be?”
It’s a big question and they certainly hesitated at proclaiming a catch-all solution. Interestingly, none of the men could really think of any institutional changes that they felt would make a considerable difference. For example, when the question of pushing men’s therapy came up, most of them acknowledged its importance but felt that even with the confidentiality, “it’s harder with men, because there’s a lot of stereotypes and expectations that are under that.” Point being, if you perceive the idea of expressing emotions as uncomfortable, signing up to do it with a professional is not the most inviting option.
Instead, many guys reframed the conversation around men’s mental health to be one of support and hope rather than of complacent critique. I was struck by how one guy explained how different rhetoric could possibly motivate more men to take direct steps in improving their mental health. “I think when you say men are mentally unwell because they’re emotionally stunted, because masculinity is toxic,” he posited, “yeah, no man looks at that and says, ‘Well, I want to get better.’” But, an alternative framing could be, “This is the society that we live in, and these are the kind of roles that we’ve constructed for ourselves, and they have these consequences, and they’re negative for many different people, and so that’s why we’re pushing against it.”
Perhaps the most important advice they gave was to urge individual men to resist emotional discomfort and start the right conversations. “I always try and initiate conversations with my male friends to kind of model vulnerability, because then they’ll be vulnerable with me back,” one guy said. “And so I think if men who are comfortable with that make a concerted effort to do that, it’ll kind of spread.”
I originally wrote this piece because I noticed a lack of a solutions-based direction for the men’s mental health crisis. But over the course of these interviews, I quickly realized that there is no concrete solution we can prescribe to men that would help them develop their emotional expression; that’s inherent to them and it’s ultimately up to them to work on it within their own support systems. This is not necessarily an easy feat or practice; socially ingrained expectations are at once intangible and pervasive, making them a tricky barrier to overcome. Furthermore, men who don’t fall in the category of cisgender, straight, white men face their own independent challenges when working to improve their mental and social health. These diverse experiences deserve their own in-depth conversations, showing the complexities of the men’s mental health crisis that beg to be addressed. However, recalling what one interviewee said, the main thing that we can collectively do is change the way we talk about it: men are capable, wanting, and deserving of spaces where they can feel emotionally supported and do the same for others.
