To everyone who believes men's feeling don't matter the only thing I can say is if my feelings don't matter then why should yours
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Mental Health
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Agreed
Finally someone says a dam thing about our mental health
Yeah you go guys, it’s all super important no matter the gender and ethnocultural background. Suffering alone has no meaning. death stranding incredible track about this
My highschool has a club that is basically just group therapy for guys only. As a regular attendee, it kicks ass.
I think the recent lack of male only spaces causes a huge amount of problem for men.
Its about stopping issued not fixing them once they are a problem.
All the male spaces I have been in have had guys opening up and getting support.
But when women are around they just seem to judge men for opening up, or belittle their issues as a joke/ insignificant to women's, or sometimes they shut it down and blame to patriarchy for not allowing men to open up when they are the ones stopping men from opening up.
OMG it's so good to hear that this is changing. Twenty years ago, in college, I responded to flyers around campus about a support group forming. The therapist refused because obviously the support group was only for women. No mention on the flyers. She was surprised I tried to sign up and said I'd make everyone uncomfortable.
I know we have a ways to go but I'm glad there's even a thought that maaaaaybe men need and can benefit from support, too?
I live in Australia
The homicide rate here is 0.86 deaths per 100k people per year
Of those, approx 66% are male.
The suicide rate is 12.3 deaths per 100k per year.
Of those, 75% are male.
The statistics are similar in most Western countries.
Pause for a second and think about the last time that you heard that mentioned either in casual conversation or in the news media.
It is not spoken about.
There was an article in my country in the news recently about men needing help too. The comments were ghastly. That women need it more and it was because of men, etc. Only one person in those comments stood up and addressed that actually men do need help too and that part of the problem could be to help men to cope and offering support because they don't have as many options as other groups.
I see an article about it, every now and then. But it's definitely not something that's being addressed with a sense of urgency. I guess the attitude that men just need to endure in silence, which I grew up with, is still pervasive. Close relationships with men, where you can talk about emotions, were discouraged, because that's gay and gay is bad. I know how idiotic and toxic that is, but I also notice how deeply ingrained this is for me. When I see men show emotions, I instinctively think of them as weak. Then I have to make a conscious effort to think how dumb that is. As I think I'm not the only one who was taught this fucked up shit, the only way forward seems to be a generational effort. Each generation tries to bring up their children a little less fucked up until we end up with a somewhat sane attitude two or three generations from now.
One third of family violence victims are male as well. The government's policy is that we don't exist.
Doesn't that mean that 2/3rds of domestic violence victims are women...
It does. The point is that 1/3 of the victims have nowhere to turn. Almost all the help is directed at women, with active hostility to male "victims". This leaves abused men nowhere to turn.
It's also worth noting that many places have extremely gender biased rules/laws when it comes to domestic violence. The default is often to just arrest the male. This both creates a bias in the data, as well as allowing some women to weaponise domestic violence laws.
Men are also far less likely to be believed, and so report less.
It may well be men are more violent, once these are accounted for, but the bias is far less than the raw statistics make out.
It does, but at least where I live, there are systems in place to help female victims of domestic violence. Of course it would be better if there was no violence at all, and more could always be done to help them, but I haven't really heard of a place where men could go if they're victims of domestic violence.
Yeah, also like 97% of murders are done by men, BUT more to the point, if men had good mental health care and had a culture that gave them better mental health outcomes, this would mean a lot of murder would never happen. People think 'toxic masculinity' means 'men are bad' but that's not it, it's that I grew up in a culture where a man saying he mistakenly thought he might actually be gay at one point because a bunch of kids in middle school ganged up on him repeatedly and attacked him for ''being gay'', was responded to by the other guys walking out of the room and calling him gay. Or when me and one other roommate resolved an argument by discussing our shared religious beliefs concerning Jesus's words to love one another, the other roommates with the same religion called us fags. These were adult men. Point being, our culture is toxic TO MEN. It's not doing much besides creating a lot of men who can't talk about their feelings, and have to be constantly on guard about being attacked for being 'gay' by admitting they have feelings or affection. There's a lot of guys married to someone that will mock them for getting too emotional or bringing up their feelings. It's often clearly communicated that those aspects of a man are not appreciated, nor welcomed. A lot of guys would much rather feel welcomed and appreciated for being fully human.
In my area, cis het women are largely dividable into groups that understand this and wish cis het men would (it maybe admit it if they secretly understand), and cis het women who understand this and grow hostile when other women point it out, endangering the largest vector of exploitation. And I get it, since most of the cis het men do it to women, when they can (red state). But an eye for an eye is really not making anything better for anyone, it's just who can con who first and worst, for the longest time frame. It's kind of like narc-ing the narc turns you into the narc. I wish everyone would just go work on personal healing and growth and encourage others it's ok and desirable to do this, rather than making a competition of who can be the sickest. But that wouldn't be profitable to the overlords, who stigmatize it, make it inaccessible, and exploit our illnesses, mental and physical.
Yeah I agree, and it's frustrating people do this to eachother, solidarity is so deeply necessary and so difficult to convince people about.
Yes it is. Men and women can support each other holistically and as a whole. We just have to realize there are opportunists among us, and they are also unwell, more unwell than us. I'm not sure how to handle persistent, demonstrable undermining, but I'd gather after a couple or few instances, sadly, somehow segregating them if and until they seek serious professional therapy from experienced therapists trained in personality disorders with a proven track record of the behavior being curtailed over long periods of time. But I am not a therapist.
I think so, yes, but that's beyond the point. I don't think anyone here is claiming or even implying that "Women don't suffer from issues", cause well, they do. The point they're making is that it's not talked about for men, or at the very least, not nearly as much as it should be.
Yes women do suffer, and that should be treated respectfully and have empathy for, we just think it should be the same for men as well, cause they do suffer from a ton of mental health issues as well.
I'm not disputing any of that, it was just a strange statistic to use for illustrating men's mental health. There are better statistics in this post already where men are majority sufferers/victims, instead of a decisive minority.
It's not a contest. Those minority of men are still people who need support.
Rest assured, the visibility of that statistic is very much in the minority. Feel free to look up the funding ratios for domestic violence against women and domestic violence against men. One third of the support won't even come close.
I read that as "love and cake" -- but yes, that too.
I read it as "men weed" which is nice
Men's mental health is certainly important, I would change one thing about this image: 'Men feel things' should be changed to 'Men feel emotions'. Beyond that, I have no disagreements with this post!
You have mountains of work to do if you want societies to realize that men suffer mentally too..
I hope you realise that now you're fighting the patriarchy. They want us to believe that men have their shit together and women are all runny eye-makeup and hysteria. It's a big fight to pick.
Sure, but it's well worth doing, and can be done by many.
After all, one aspect of all this is realizing you don't have to do everything yourself!
Yes. I'm one of the women other women resent-and usually the men who are suffering, too - because I do point it out. I'd love it if we can all come together and work towards healing our community. Or another one. You can't force people to heal.
Yes, we all need to part of the change, if my bro wants to cry, I'll hug him and tell him to cry as much as he can 🩵🤍, I was told as a kid that I shouldn't cry because I'm a man, I'm a big boy... F that. I wanna cry so much now.. I just can't.. something is not right
I was told that as a girl, so... People exploit feelings, and I get it. We need to work towards healing for those who exploit feelings, too
One thing I think should definitely be put out there more loudly is that Alexithymia(emotional blindness) is likely very common among dudes. I'm mostly going off personal experience, and how I've had issues identifying my emotions, and how I've heard some dudes I've talked to straight up just say they think they don't feel things. I suspect potentially most dudes don't understand how to detect emotions outside of very intense sadness, anger, etc. and I think that they need that communicated and a path they can maybe follow.
100% agreed. Bottling things up creates exploiters of those who would show emotions.
I'm rather convinced that society knows - it just does not care.
It doesn't matter if a lot of people care about something if they don't fight for these things to happen "society" ie the beaurcratic powers that be in different institutions will not automatically feature your issue. Inertia is more efficient for them. The reason so many minority initiatives have worked is because small but dedicated groups worked extraordinarily hard to pressure "society" to change. It's Pride month, look at that situation. The LGBTQIA is a small fraction of society, smaller back at it's Pride origins by far because a lot of people were scared out of their minds to come forward.
I understand that the instinct is to mope, to treat these problems as too big to change but that isn't healthy. What people need to remember is that just wishing or creating reasons not to try doesn't make things so. It is an unfortunate issue with straight cis men that they are not primed to organized guerilla social action. In part I think it is because there's this toxic internal expectation that someone else should be doing that work for you on your behalf. There isn't. If men want this to happen the movement has to start with men. Other people will join you and help you but they aren't going to do the basic work for you. That whole "elevate ( ____ ) voices" thing? Men could fill that space but that's the thing you have to put the work in to create the movement that treats your word as the authentic voice of the concern. Your voice needs to start that snowball effect and you need to make and start executing the plan.
Venting isn't all that useful on it's own mental health wise. Get it out of your system but add a second step. Ask yourself what you are going to do about it. Then find people in your area and organize. Be a leader of the movement or support one.
I am afraid that a lot depends on cultural context of the whole society. I don't think the context is fertile for men's activism for rights. The groups that exist are almost exclusively misogynist and conservative. I believe that a movement, even if really focused on men's issues from a general perspective (I.e. not misogynistic) would be received very poorly, will fail to develop solidarity with other groups and would be accused of stealing space to them.
Frankly, I am not convinced at all that each demographic should fight their own battles, I believe in better analyzed demands that will merge under the same front gay rights, women's rights, men's rights and so on.
I mean I exist in a very LGBTQIA+ city. My friends across the spectrum of the rainbow have expressed sentiments about how men's mental health is an issue but it is really hard to interface with it because men like to talk about it... but they seem to want to nope out of and defer spearheading an initiative. Because it's not easy. It never is easy.
Most of the LGBTQIA have a model. A group who is directly plans a thing and then the people who are adjacent show up. People generally have the spoons to make one to two issues their main. This is usually where they take the effort to spearhead the thing, be part of the committee, figure out the logistics and run the getting the word out. That issue because it is so energy intensive usually is one they feel most directly affected or endangered by... but they can make time and energy to show up for like 10 other things to do fundraising, protests or whatever because they support friends. Stuff where they just need to know where to be and what to do. That's comparitive low energy.
You could look to the LGBTQIA as help and go to like a Pride committee but generally speaking when approaching people for help you have to expect imperfection.
I see both sides. It takes enough men and women admitting there's an experience that can be improved, and both have vested interests in not improving it. Sadly, behavioral issues are shamed, rather than understood. I've known people who were sent to jails, prisons, psych wards, and the family distanced and blamed. Even those who self-harm, even self-unalive are treated with embarrassment, anger, guilt and shame.
Perhaps.... but I don't wanna lose hope in humanity, so I'll blame ignorance
Can't I just have a molehill of work. I've already got a lot on my plate with no outlet.
🫂
Yes you can, any help is appreciated and welcomed 🫶
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