Entry 7: Black men's mental health

     It’s safe to say that in America and other western countries, Black men’s mental health is severely challenged by racism. Most police brutality is directed towards Black men, in fact, according to statistics, 1 in 1000 Black men can expect to be killed by the police. Most people may also make the assumption that Black men have no need for expressing their feelings even more so than White men considering the stereotyping of Black men as dangerous criminals, since dangerous criminals don’t have feelings, right? Black men are also less likely to use mental health services compared to non-Hispanic White men. One factor that influences this is that when Black men seek mental health, they try to find a psychologist of the same race, as they are more likely to give better advice on issues that only Black people face. The problem with this preference of theirs is that only around 4% of the psychology workforce consists of Black people, making it hard for them to find someone who fits their needs. It’s also worth noting that structural racism and the history of Black men in the United States, the way people treat their mental health is heavily affected by biases by medical providers as well as high poverty rates which will affect their ability to afford mental health services. These factors can make Black men distrustful towards mental health systems which only encourages them to not seek help.

In addition to these humbling statistics, the dwindling mental health of young Black men can find its sources to societal factors. African Americans rank 2nd as the group most affected my mental health complications, beaten only by Hispanics. In North America, simply being a part of the African American community means that you are at an increased risk of being prone to anxiety and depression. This is widely attributed to the lack of resources attributed to Black communities for this field, as well as severe distrust of the healthcare system in these communities due to a history of mistreatment, prejudice, and straight up abuse by Western governments towards their Black communities. The first hurdle that this group faces is identified by Thomas A. Vance, PhD and Research Fellow at the Gender Identity Program of ColumbiaU. He deems that the first factor contributing to the staggering numbers seen in the Black community is that of systematic barriers. What is meant by this is that African Americans are disproportionately represented in the less favoured groups of society, being 40% of the homeless, nearly half the prison population and also about half of all children in the foster care system despite being only 13% of the population of the United States. These groups which already carry negative stigma are academically deemed to be “high risk populations” in the mental health domain as they are all determining factors in the development of mental health issues going forward in life. Moreover, young Black men are unlikely to seek help for their mental health concerns because of the stigma associated with it by their own peers. The dominating perception of mental health is overwhelmingly negative in this group, as a study surfaced showing that about 60% of young African Americans deem signs of depression and anxiety as “signs of weakness”. These sorts of ideas go further to perpetuate disparaging stereotypes associated with this community.

This will be our final blog post concerning a specific issue. Next week we will probably make a concluding post, but it won’t be as long. I’d like to share some survey results with you. Most of them did not work, as we cannot correlate certain answers with each other. However, we did see that most people answered that a higher amount of girls spoke up to the participants  about their mental health issues than boys. We also saw that around a quarter of participants did not have a good relationship with their father, and that around 20% of participants did not believe that men face any social injustices.

Have a good week!

Entry 6: Men and Video Games

If you are a young man living in the year 2021, chances are you’ve either played a video game before, or it is perhaps a daily hobby of yours. Maybe you go through phases of time where you do a lot of gaming, and then stop playing for a few months. Either way, many people across the world turn to gaming nowadays for personal pleasure. However, when it comes to games, it is a riskier hobby to pursue than others. While it can be a great hobby, it can also be a drug at the same time. Why is this all so important, and why is it being discussed on a men’s mental health blog? Well, around 60% of gamers are male, and men are more prone to getting addicted than women are due to alterations to the brain in an area of the brain that handles impulse control. But why do men tend to gravitate more towards games than women? Well, it ties into what we talked about in our previous post: men tend to avoid opening up about their feelings. When you don’t talk about your problems to others, you fail to find solutions that you would get from someone else’s comfort or advice. Failing to find solutions makes you feel stuck, and when you feel stuck and that you have no control over your life, where do you go? Into the gaming world. Video games are different from other types of media as they offer control over what you do. That’s why they are addicting. They give you that dopamine rush, that feeling that you can actually be powerful during hard times where you aren’t in the real world. While women turn to other people for mental help, men feel stuck, and can’t do that. So they turn to computers as a way to cope, since computers are not people that can judge them for feeling down.

Along with being easily accessible and being a great way to escape the letdowns of our daily lives, this practice can become downright dangerous in the long run. No, I do not mean that video games cause mass shootings: they don’t. What I mean is that video games have such a nature that makes them a preferable activity to going outside, playing sports, finding a job, etc. These are all factors at play in our physical health, as there are reasons behind the stereotypical gamer being either underweight or overweight. Having video games as the sole purpose of waking up in the morning can render us completely sedentary, with a normal diet being enough to send us at an overweight body mass index because of the lack of exercise. On the other hand, other people tend to overcompensate their potentially high caloric intakes, rendering them underweight. Both of these conditions carry significant health hazards on their own, from a higher risk of heart disease to joint pains, brain fog, etc. In addition to this, fitness gurus do have a point that a healthy body creates a healthy mind, as young men suffering from the physical conditions above experience a lack of drive, dependence on video games, social reclusiveness, depression, anxiety, anger issues, general lack of impulse control, a sense of being in what Warren Farrell, Ph.D. calls a “purpose void”, etc. All of this is from playing video games too much. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of Christian Mom against video games type of extremist. Hell, I have been playing video games for most of my life as well to varying extents. One thing I can tell semi-jokingly to help your mental health as a young man is to steer clear away from League of Legends. The Netflix series Arcane is good, the game it is from isn’t, full stop. On a closing note, what can you do to avoid the pitfalls of video game addiction? Well, finding purpose is of utmost importance and yet it is probably the single hardest feat for a young person nowadays. Here is my advice: read books, work out, keep away from the media, and do not pay too much attention to social media. Following these steps will make you feel like a new man in a matter of weeks.

As always, if you need anyone to talk to, that’s what we’re here for. You can leave a comment on our blog or contact us on Instagram or Facebook if you are seeking help. Feel free to share this blog post so that we can further spread the word about men’s mental health.

Bibliography

https://foundationsasheville.com/blog/are-video-games-a-coping-mechanism-or-problem-behavior/

Entry 5: What's unique about men's mental health?

         It’s about time that we finally discuss what makes men’s mental health so different from women’s. Like, did this whole campaign need to be this exclusive? Well, that’s a hard question to answer. While we are not denying women’s mental health by any means. However, men need way more convincing when it comes to getting them to seek professional help. Usually, a man will develop mental health issues by not speaking openly about their emotions, and even if they are told that the whole “men don’t express their emotions” line is absolute nonsense, the thought process of holding them in happens automatically even without thinking about the consequences of doing it. This also goes for the mentality of relying on oneself and not seeking help from others. Even if we told men that it’s ok to seek help from others, it would cause additional problems, including the worry that if they start relying on others, they might rely too much on others and become a useless member of society who can’t do anything on their own, because, well, the average man isn’t used to relying on others due to their assigned gender role. It’s also hard to break these gender roles and reassure men that they can expose their emotions without being mocked or judged for it. One method would be to focus less on the present and more on the future. Boys that grow up to be dads that suffer from these mental health issues should teach their sons as a father figure that it’s encouraged to tell people how you feel and to avoid old nonsense like “boys don’t cry” when your son is feeling sad.

As mentioned above, the ways mental problems affect an individual vary immensely from one gender to the next. Although it is a scientific fact that women are more likely to receive diagnoses of mental illness ranging from anxiety to depression, it is our fathers, brothers and sons that often take the way of trying to find answers at the bottom of a bottle or by become socially recluse, as Japan’s famous hikikomori’s illustrate. Studies have been showing for the past two decades that both genders deal with these afflictions differently--women tend to keep their emotions hidden from plain sight and refrain from maintaining frequent social interactions, while men are much more aggressive in their reaction by turning to more extreme forms of evolution of their character towards coercive, intentionally noncompliant and impulsive ways of life. This principle of noncompliance is well illustrated in how among all British clinical referrals relating to mental health problems in 2019, only about a third were men. This shows how men, as a general rule, stay clear away from seeking health or even mentioning symptoms of mental distress to their peers. That is not to say that women are more mentally ill than men of course, as research shows that both genders are affected at similar rates for most conditions such as BPD and ADS, it is simply to show that both genders do not seek help at the same rate or deal with those conditions in the same way. 

As always, if you need anyone to talk to, that’s what we’re here for. You can leave a comment on our blog or contact us on Instagram or Facebook if you are seeking help. Feel free to share this blog post so that we can further spread the word about men’s mental health.

“Mental Health Statistics: Men and Women.” Mental Health Foundation, 1 Oct. 2021, https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics/mental-health-statistics-men-and-women.

Otten, Daniëlle, et al. “Similarities and Differences of Mental Health in Women and Men: A Systematic Review of Findings in Three Large German Cohorts.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 1 Jan. 1AD, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.553071/full.

Moyser, Melissa. “This Article Compares the Mental Health Outcomes (I.e., Self-Rated Mental Health, Change in Mental Health since Physical Distancing Began, Severity of Symptoms Consistent with Generalized Anxiety Disorder in the Two Weeks Prior to Completing the Survey, and Life Stress) of Male, Female, and Gender-Diverse Participants in a Recent Crowdsource Questionnaire, Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians -- Your Mental Health (April 24 to May 11, 2020).” Gender Differences in Mental Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Government of Canada, Statistics Canada, 9 July 2020, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2020001/article/00047-eng.htm.

“Men's Mental Health: Common Challenges.” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/mens-mental-health#men-and-mental-health.

No post this week, we're collecting data! Please take the survey!

 Hello Everyone! You could probably tell from Tuesday, but there is no blog post this week, as we had to take time to create a survey in order to gather data on the awareness of men's mental health. If you could take some time out of your day to complete the survey, we would appreciate it a lot.

Here's the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WJV2SWP

Thank you, and see you next week for another post!

Entry 4: Bullying

The Victim

You may remember your highschool and elementary school days, where little mattered apart from what your mom packed for lunch in your lunchbox or what game you would play with your friends during recess. Another part of this past that you might remember are the seminars focusing on bullying and why it is bad, leading to eyerolls from nearly all students. From your perspective, it might be that you have never even recognized that you were being bullied yourself, because schools have been notoriously bad at teaching and reacting to bullying behaviours in both boys and girls. This can be easily simply explained by how both genders go about dealing with these kinds of things very differently. For boys, the behaviour tends to be more on the physical side, where one boy or a group of boys will target a student that reacts to menacing behaviour with perceived weakness. It is interesting to note that boys rarely discriminate based on gender when finding targets to bully.

If you were bullied, it may be that you did not fit into what other boys were taught was the social expectation for young men, be it because you were not very athletic, strong, tall, showing assertiveness, etc. You cannot blame yourself for not standing up for yourself, not getting help or even for not realizing that you were the target of bullying in the first place. After all, research shows us that boys are more likely than their female counterparts to tolerate bullying behaviours, and might even stay friends with their bully, as they might just see it as boys being boys and the like.

The Bully

Some of you may remember instances in which you were the bully. Maybe you didn’t realize it at first, or maybe at the time you really did believe that hurting others was an acceptable way of making yourself happy. Heck, you could even be doing that right now without noticing it, especially if you were in high school. We all know that physically hurting someone repeatedly for no reason other than fun is considered bullying, but if you engage in gossip or teasing other people, that can quickly become bullying. If you are the type of person that frequently engages in those types of banter you might want to consider how the person you’re picking on feels first. If they are okay with it and find it amusing too, then that’s fine. But if they don’t, well, it’s no longer just teasing, it’s bullying, especially when the person you’re picking on is someone that isn’t in your friend circle, and the only time you ever talk to them is to tease and insult them. It’s not rocket science, you shouldn’t bully people. Some kids might consider it “cool” or rebellious to go against the lesson that adults have been trying to cram into their heads since they were born that bullying is never a good thing. Yes, some people that get bullied can learn things from a situation where they’re being bullied, and the same goes for the one doing the bullying. However, bullying can cause permanent emotional scars on people. Right now, it seems like bullying is a rite of passage. We can try and try to reduce the amount of bullying present in schools, but the truth is that some of it will always go under the radar due to those who won’t speak up about being victims.

If you do the things that were previously described as bullying, you should stop. Chances are, you do not care for the feelings of the one who you’re bullying, so if that’s the case, the whole “you’re hurting someone else” speech isn’t going to work on you, so we’ll have you know instead that you’ll most probably end up regretting the pain you inflicted on others once you become more mature, and that feeling of guilt could be just as bad if not worse than the pain you’re currently inflicting on whoever you’re picking on.

This week is a special case when it comes to asking you to come talk to us about your problems. Bullying can be the cause of many of the other topics that we’ve discussed already. So, if you need any advice on how you should handle certain bullying situations, feel free to ask for our help by leaving a comment on our blog, or contacting us on Instagram or Facebook.

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/save0ursons/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saveoursons101

Sources:

Gordon, Sherri. “How Gender Influences Bullying.” Verywell Family, Verywell Family, 14 June 2021, https://www.verywellfamily.com/do-girls-and-boys-bully-differently-460494. 

        Ditter, Bob. “Bullying Behavior in Boys . . . and What to Do about It.” American             Camp Association, 31 May 2019, https://www.acacamps.org/resource-                            library/camping-magazine/bullying-behavior-boys-what-do-about-it.

#sos #mentalhealth #boys #boysmentalhealth #heretohelp #activism #bullying #bullies

Entry 3: Young Men in the Workforce

Professional and societal expectations can be among of the harshest things to deal with, especially as a young man who may not have found their calling in life just yet. I am ready to bet that your parents have been pressuring you to get a job, no matter which one, since around the end of high school. Although this is not an intrinsically bad thing, since getting a steady income that is not from your parents’ pockets is a huge step towards achieving independence early on, it is very likely that this pushed you into a position that you don’t particularly care for or even downright hate. One of the first things one learns in the job market is that working a job that one has aversion to is an incredibly draining experience that should and must be addressed as early as possible before the situation devolves. Another phenomenon that could have played into your hypothetical dislike of your job could be that managers and supervisors, especially those of the older generation, have very little regard for the pay-to-workload ratio, and may expect you to go above and beyond for what is most probably just above 100$ CAD a week because you likely decided to work part-time because of your class schedule. The answer to this is simply to look for jobs that have managers and bosses closer to your age range that understand your position as a young adult who has just entered the job market and manage their expectations accordingly.

In the past year, it’s been difficult for the unemployed to find jobs due to the pandemic, but that’s not the only reason why young men specifically have been struggling in the workforce recently. In fact, more and more adult men are living in a parent’s home without a job as years go by. Because of this, men will have a lower and lower involvement in the labor force if this trend does not change. We hear you, finding a job can be difficult and stressful, especially when it comes to entry-level jobs which do not provide the best working conditions nor do they provide any low-speed jobs. If you’re trying to find a job with no experience, chances are you’ll end up working at a restaurant where you are expected to always work fast which can take a toll on your mental health. Getting good work is also becoming harder and harder for young men due to the increasing amount of male dropouts in school due to the reasons we touched on in the first entry of this blog. It’s also harder for men to easily accept being ordered around by a boss when society idealizes men that are strong leaders. People can have a hard time fitting into that image when they feel like just another asset being used by a company for their own gain. Because of the expectations thrown at men from a very young age, the pressure to become a leader can be devastating to one’s mental health when said person is always doing their best to overperform, especially when not every man is cut out to be a leader.

As always, if you need anyone to talk to, that’s what we’re here for. You can leave a comment on our blog or contact us on Instagram or Facebook if you are seeking help. Feel free to share this blog post so that we can further spread the word about men’s mental health.

Sources:

Coy, Peter. “Fewer Young Men Are in the Labor Force. More Are Living at Home.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-11/fewer-young-men-are-in-the-labor-force-more-are-living-at-home. 

Boettcher, Nick, et al. “Men's Work-Related Stress and Mental Health: Illustrating the Workings of Masculine Role Norms.” American Journal of Men's Health, SAGE Publications, 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6438430/.

Entry 2: Men and Family Relations

 What it means to grow up as a boy

If you are reading this, chances are that you are a young man between ages 16 to 21 that grew up in the early 2000s. If you live in North America, the chance that you grew up with divorced parents has surpassed the odds of a coinflip. Since this sounds bad, you may start to think that you were lucky to have parents that remained together or at least kept contact with each other, either because they did not have any hard feelings held against the other or because they both want to support and raise you as you should be. It is necessary to point this out because nearly a third of North American households lack a father figure to take responsibility and care for the children. This post is mostly addressed to this boy that fits into this last category, that of fatherless boys that did not grow up with a positive masculine figure in their life. Although on paper, it does not sound so bad to grow up with only a mom. Hell, you regrettably have not known anything else until this point in your life. On the other hand, I am willing to bet that at some point in your teenage years you felt you could not share something with your mom, boy things because you feared that she would not understand. Do not get me wrong, single mothers can be great at explaining mathematics, help with homework, etc. but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot teach their boys how to be boys, and this hurts young men like yourself who find themselves stuck without a way of expressing the concerns that are proper to their gender. It may be that you have found another way of trying to fill the void left by your father, such as drowning yourself in YouTube videos, online browsing, and video games to name a few, but there is one thing you can know for sure: you cannot let your sons suffer through what you have been subject to. You need to be there for him, support him, and understand him so that the cycle of horror finally ends.

From a father’s perspective

When you think about it, how often do you think kids stay with their mothers after a divorce, and what effects do you think the lack of a father has on the children, more specifically the boys? Girls have an easier time relating to their mothers as they are the same gender, but in the case of divorce where the sons end up living with their moms, who do they have to relate to? Back when the women’s movement came around, the purpose of women was transformed from having one option being raising children to either doing that, raising money or somehow managing to do both at the same time. The same type of movement was never done for men, so the idea of purpose given to men remains the same: make money, or you’re a failure. By putting it this way, it really seems silly and it obviously isn’t true. Fathers can provide for a family in other ways than making money. They can raise children just as well as mothers, but society hasn’t given them the chance. Society has brainwashed men into thinking about themselves and their careers only so that they can maintain their reputation as strong and reliable. As a consequence, they’re blinded by another very important aspect of life: their family. Our point is that both of these examples cause fathers to not be present in their sons’ lives, which is one of the leading causes of suicide for young men. If by any chance you are a father reading this, or someone who wishes to become a father, you need to be there for your children, especially your sons who need you the most, and you need to raise them with as much love as mothers provide.

As always, if you need anyone to talk to, that’s what we’re here for. You can leave a comment on our blog or contact us on Instagram or Facebook if you are seeking help. Feel free to share this blog post so that we can further spread the word about men’s mental health.

Sources:

TEDxTalks. “The Boy Crisis: A Sobering Look at the State of Our Boys | Warren Farrell Ph.D. | TEDxMarin.” YouTube, YouTube, 19 Oct. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi1oN1icAYc

Farrell, Warren, and John Gray. “Dad-Deprived Boys Versus Dad-Enriched Boys” The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do about It, BenBella Books, Dallas, TX, 2019.