There is something that is observed over and over about men: they do not seem to engage in help-seeking behaviours as often or as easily as women. We would like them to. We see it as being to their own advantage, as well as best for their spouses, partners, children, and wider community.
But let’s take our focus off the men themselves for a moment and focus on the care-givers in the community. A pertinent question: what do we make of men and their apparent reluctance to seek help?
Recently I came across an article online at the Daily Mail entitled “Why do men suffer in silence?” Among a range of views canvassed, two stood out. One suggested that “the problem for men is pride. We learn it from our fathers”. Another expressed view was that men in danger of experiences like deep depression do not have the humility to ask for help.
My concern is that we can come close to societal blaming of men for the way they are, and not be aware, therefore, of the ways in which that can make it even harder for men to change.
We can look at human behaviour from two points of view. We can focus on the negative consequences of a given action, or we can seek to understand what positive intentions originally motivated the action in the first place.
Do not the roles that men can inhabit strongly today originate many generations ago in a desire to serve the community? From eons previously, males sought to protect, feed, and explore further habitable regions. This involved things like risk-taking, competiveness, and self-disregard for the sake of cherished ones. Granted, the ideals aren’t always realised in fact –after all we are each of us prone to self-sabotage. Yet there is a significant difference between saying that men have problems because they are proud and lack humility, and saying that men are prone to over-investing in, say, their risk-taking or self-disregarding roles, to the detriment of their own health.
In truth, the whole community has found traditional male roles beneficial, and continues to do so. On the other hand, it is clear that men need to have a wider range of roles available to them than has often been the case in the past, for their own sake, and for the community’s sake. These roles require an essentially masculine expression so that men can appropriate them with confidence and without suspicion.
Who else but male role models will be sufficient for this purpose? Slowly we are seeing such models emerge, John Kirwan being but one of them. Closer to home, our own Mensline telephone counselling service is another. These are examples where the wider community has realised its responsibility to endorse what many men individually are now encouraged to pick up and use.
The scene will change only slowly, of that we can be sure. And so, if much advertising revenue is available to strain against my shopping preferences, maybe soon the wider community will find resources to enable men to acknowledge and internalise the benefits of self-care.