RodentI would say there are multiples angles to this. From the way mental health and therapy is structured (I can elaborate on that later), how men (or people in general) free up time to dedicate attention to their mental health when they got jobs to do, bills to pay and a family to feed and finally to what I would consider mixed messages from the culture where men are being told they should be free to show their emotions but are then faced with the criticism that they are expressing themselves the wrong way
or that they are facing the unspoken social consequences of shown weakness disqualifying them from the relationship market. No matter what women or men might tell you, they will not look at you as more mature and respected when you show your emotions the same way that the average woman does. But perhaps we can meet more in the middle.
On a side note, I know the Conan and Batman examples should just illustrate a point but I think it's necessary to say that the average man does not gain the mass approval of women, hero status or plentiful resources as a consequence of basic stoicism...he's just another man doing what he ought to be doing.
Personally, I cried a lot as a kid and even as teenager at the age of 14/15. I couldn't afford to care much about the approval of boys or girls for showing vulnerability publicly like that but suffice to say I was one of the nerdy outsiders mostly ignored by everybody anyway.
Indeed, there are multiple angles to this and it's a complex question.
I particularly like your "mixed message" point and is generally the one I was refering, moreso than say female approval or the relationship market (because I, personally, on that particular aspect, could not give less of a toss lol, but moving on). As relates to my own personal life example, I was confronted once with, if you've read my personal situation by "If this would happen to me, I wouldn't hesitate; I'd kill him" which to me is the perfect example of machismo or "male behavior" we've been structured to adopt. To which I replied "Alright, tough guy; you're better than me; let's go, let's go kill him". Which naturally produced the opposite reaction, with sudden recoil and the abandonment of said machismo in favor of a more natural attitude. Which to me, sent me the message "Okay, I'm supposed to be tougher and act like a man, but a man can't even act like a man himself". Which makes the criticism of "you're supposed to be tougher" rather irrelevant a matter, because you're really not.
I find this bias, this mostly-publicity or socially constructed "macho" image presented to men as complitely ridiculous, as opposed to the common, "normal" reaction, which is basically to break down and cry. And that SHOULD be fine, because it's a hard situation to deal with.
Yet often enough, as pertains to even the reactions of people in your every day lives, you're supposed to "act tougher". Which is ridiculous.
I often like to say the label "men" and women" is rather obsolete and that "individual" is a better way to tag people, if people insist on using labels and that our focus from thinking of men as "Men" and women as "Women" is useless as opposed to thinking of "Men" and "Women" as people instead, would you view this as a correct assumption or as a naively formulated concept? As relates to mental health, I feel the pressures put both on men to be "rocks" and women to be "princesses" (notice how the latter is evolving in publicity, media and the like, but not the former) is so completely archaic as should be removed entirely.
I've been personally following therapies where a recurrent theme is "how do you feel" and actually expressing or wondering said feelings is so completely out of place, not because I do not feel them but because it's become so out of place to express said feelings that it DOES indeed have an impact on mental health. Since societal roles have been pretty much encouraged and ingrained since birth, it literally creates disturbance that profoundly affect our identities and conceptions of ourselves and, I've discovered, gives us difficulties in dealing with certain events.
Which is why I feel it's an undertalked problems, because while in the past months I've seen several dozen organisations dealing with women's social problems or mental health, I've seen only a handful dealing with men's, some of which are not even specifically designed to deal with such. It's rather incongruous to me.
Is behavior really conditionned towards mass approval? I'm reading again the Conan and Batman comments and am wondering if that's what your saying and if so, how out of place that seems to me. Our health shouldn't be tied to mass approval, should it?
One thing I do find a crying need is the following taken off of Wikipedia; "Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with forms of depression, whereas men are three times more likely to be given a diagnosis of a social anxiety disorder than women". Yet services are next to non-existent as to men-specific mental health groups. Even more true in the case of ethnic minorities.
I hope I'm making sense. Sometimes the French gets in the way but others, the way the ideas kind of jumble I feel it hard to clearly illustrate them.
EDIT: Sorry, I screwed up the quotes and can't fix it lol
kamya said:
Too often ignored but it's not something that I think will ever change.
No one cares about men's issues. =P
I'm discovering it's not the case with mental health professionals, but much more so in the population at large.
Soooo here is the thread to do it in.
