Yes, you might still believe that psychologically men are from Mars and women from Venus, but it’s now over 30 years since ‘that’ book on gender was first published, and a lot has changed in the world since then.
Men face particular challenges in 2024 (see this feature for more on the male identity crisis and myths about modern men) and, in order to connect with them on a topic as serious as mental health given the high male suicide rate (see here for more on that), employers need to understand these challenges and how they affect talking to them effectively.
In this feature we list top tips from experts about how to engage men in messages about mental health.
Watch your language
Inviting men to a small room to sit opposite each other to talk about their feelings is unlikely to fly with most men.
In fact, Shawn Lesser, true to his company name The REAL Mental Health Foundation, keeps it real when he says:
“A woman once said to me, ‘is The REAL a safe place where guys can talk about their feelings?’ and I wanted to throw up because guys don’t talk like that. I replied that guys come to talk about stuff that they’re going through; it means the same but it doesn’t make us want to throw up.”
Experts tend to agree that, generally, men respond to language around mental health differently to women.
As described in this article, men’s health charity Movember finds that talking about ‘mental fitness’ is more effective than talking about ‘mental health’.
Lesser also finds this language really helpful in his work with men because “it’s about building up stamina” and then “men can relate it to going to the gym and building up their fitness”.
Stephen Whitton, founder of [M]enable, a mental health company which brings mental health conversations to ‘masculine environments’, like the automotive sector where he used to work, goes one step further, suggesting ‘mental wealth’ is an even more effective phrase, explaining:
“When you talk to a group of men, especially ones working as mechanics which I often see, they don’t want to talk about things like anxiety and depression because it’s too dark. We changed the narrative to mental wealth because then it links to the point of the car industry in the first place, which is to create wealth and help facilitate people’s dreams to get the cars that they’ve always wanted, et cetera.”
How to talk about suicide
The other language point to be aware of is that when talking or writing about suicide now is you should say ‘die by suicide’ rather than ‘commit suicide’.
This small language tweak is significant because it helps to deshame suicide which was previously considered a crime, and still is in some countries. The resulting stigma which still surrounds suicide is one reason why men feel ashamed of their feelings and so don’t reveal them.
Get them talking side to side
Face to face conversations tend to be more intense and feel more vulnerable than conversations had standing side to side. As Richard Watkins, Founder of collaboration company Let’s Go, puts it:
“A therapist a few years ago told me this heuristic: women like talking face-to-face and men like talking shoulder-to-shoulder – his view was that face-to-face is not coded by men primarily as intimacy, but confrontation, which feels too much when you already feel fragile. Shoulder to shoulder evokes collective problem-solving.”
Peer support works particularly well
One of the things The REAL does is encourage men to come together in cities and go on a walk around a park. Lesser believes peer to peer support is the most effective way to engage men in conversations about mental health:
“Therapists are great but to have someone who can say to you ‘dude, I went through the exact same thing, I know how you feel but I can tell you it’s going to end’, that has a big effect. That gives you hope and you believe them. I don’t think that’s particular to men, I think it’s just human nature.”
He describes a male contact, Brent, as a life saver for him who became his ‘mental health sponsor’, like the well-established idea of sponsors in Alcoholics Anonymous, a peer network that has proved extremely effective around the globe.
Understand the link between male identity and self worth
Lesser ended up in a psychiatric unit, then in two treatment centres, after a breakdown and, when he left this and returned home without a job to do, he realised how intertwined his sense of self was – like many men – to his career:
“My company was my whole identity. My whole life. My whole existence. You find that alot, especially with men. Their identity is baked into what they do. So without this, I fell deeper into depression. I started shaking uncontrollably, so much so that people thought I had Parkinson’s Disease.”
Why is this relevant to employers and employee wellbeing?
Because employers can recognise potential trigger points for an identity crisis, including potentially a breakdown like Lesser’s, following events such as redundancy, being overlooked for promotion, critical feedback or when a project fails.
Somewhat ironically, when your identity is not rigidly tethered to your job, you can take feedback on board more easily, so then you can improve and learn more readily, and progress quicker.
What can employers do to help?
They can put an emphasis on the importance of work life balance, and encouraging employees to define themself not entirely through work. This will also help avoid burnout.
Increasing awareness of the importance of dedicating time to wellbeing basics, such as exercise, nutrition and sleep, is also helpful, as well as potentially developing new interests outside work.
In some cases, directing employees, who are at risk of their identity becoming completely enmeshed with their work, to therapy could be extremely helpful and lead to a more sustainable approach to work and productivity.
The power of purpose
Related to identity is ‘purpose’, an idea which has become a buzzword in the world of work.
But this goes further than the external measures that people often hook their work identity to – like job title, salary or seniority – because it’s more about intrinsic motivation than extrinsic (see this article for more on this).
Purpose is about doing a job that truly aligns with your values and your strengths leading to a sense of wellbeing and/or sense you are on the right path for you. This also helps you get through the tougher days.
All men are not the same
This may seem obvious but different ages, lifestages and races require different messaging.
This is particularly true when it comes to health because different ethnicities, for example, have different likelihoods of developing various conditions.
As clinically-led consultuancy Smart About Health’s Dr Laura David, CEO and founder, says, Black men are more likely to get prostate cancer with the incidence one in four for Black men and only one in eight for caucasian men.
“So there’s actually different things you need to communicate to people within your staff that enable people to go out and get the checks that they need to stay healthy. Black men, for example, need to be invited to have their PSA checks earlier,” says Dr David. Primarily the differences are found in physical health but not exclusively. She gives the example of the fact that men from particular religious communities may be less likely to feel comfortable going to a psychologist.
Engage them with what they care about – like sex!
Anecdotally we hear that it’s harder to engage men in health conversations than women, and as this feature shows, they tend to see health professionals less. The advice from experts is to pick subjects to talk about that matter to them, and use these as gateways to build up a relationship.
BAM’s Head of Workplace Wellbeing Ruth Pott in this article explains why sex has been such an important topic for grabbing interest and how you can build on that interest.
Dr David confirms that in Smart About Health’s work with men, the topic that they most want to talk about is body image:
“And specifically around body image it’s about their sexual desire and function and men are very concerned about penis size and how strong their libido is, because they feel there are certain expectations on them. They often worry they should be having sex all the time, and lasting for a certain amount of time. These are the realities and employers shouldn’t shy away from them in a session on men’s mental health.”
Smart About Health, for example, has run webinars with expert guests such as urologists in which men certainly don’t shy away from asking questions on these topics.
“One of the most common questions is around erectile dysfunction around right use of Viagra,” she says.
Be aware that eating disorders are on the rise among men
This insight also comes from Smart About Health’s Dr David:
“There’s now recognition that certain eating disorders particularly present with men such as Orthorexia, which is an obsession with cleaning eating, as well as obsessions with eating to bodybuild. There’s been a real underserving of men in this area, as there has been so much more focus on eating disorders among women.”
She points out, too, that men also experience all eating disorders including Anorexia and Bulimia, it’s just that Orthorexia is most notable in men currently.
Have senior men showing it’s ok to talk about mental health
When MAD World speaker and CEO of construction media channel The B1M, Fred Mills, was struggling with his mental health (see his profile feature here) he didn’t tell anyone what he was going through, or that he was attending counselling.
For this reason, he’s determined to talk openly now about his experiences in the hope that more men will feel confident to be open about any mental health struggle they might be facing.
“Leaders standing up and saying that it’s okay to struggle is powerful,” he says. “I talk about how I’ve got my career and I also struggle with mental health occasionally, and that’s absolutely normal, just like a high flying Chief Executive also gets a cold every now and then. Normalising it, particularly among our leaders, is really important.”
Call out the unhelpful comments
When Whitton was running a workshop recently, for a client in the automotive sector, one of the senior executives in the room said he’d describe someone who was really struggling with mental health as a “nutter”.
It’s important to understand the older generation of men may not be comfortable talking about mental health and it may manifest in unhelpful comments like this. However it’s important that, like Whitton, you have the courage to call them out:
“I said to him, in this workshop, that if he’s managed to get through life and into a senior position at 50 years old plus, without ever experiencing anything like stress or anxiety, or anything of that nature, then he’s been extremely fortunate. But I told him not to use that to judge others who have, because you could be working right next to someone who is struggling in that way and he’s not going to open up and have that important conversation if he thinks the bloke next to him will call him ‘a nutter’.”
