For years, one of the dominant messages about men’s mental health has been simple: men need to talk more. Ask for help. Reach out.
Those messages matter. But they put much of the responsibility on the person who is struggling.
What if we asked a different question: What needs to change around men to make it easier to recognize distress and get the help they need?
Improving men’s mental health requires more than encouraging men to seek help. It means recognizing how men may experience and express distress, reducing barriers to care, strengthening social connection and designing services that different groups of men will trust and use.
That question took centre stage at CAMH’s recent Men’s Mental Health Summit, where researchers, clinicians, advocates, community leaders and people with lived experience explored what we know about men’s mental health and suicide prevention – and what we need to do differently because of it.
Ask a different question: How do men experience distress?
Professor Sir Graham Thornicroft, Professor Emeritus of Community Mental Health at King’s College London, challenged the familiar assumption that the problem is simply that men don’t ask for help.
For some men, distress may not initially be recognized or described as a mental health problem. It can show up as withdrawal, substance use, anger, risk-taking or overwork. Expectations around masculinity, self-sufficiency, strength and success can also shape how distress is understood and expressed.
And mental health doesn’t exist separately from the rest of life. Relationships, employment, financial security, loneliness and belonging all matter.
So perhaps the more useful question isn’t only why some men don’t seek help. It’s whether the help we offer is designed around how people actually experience distress – and whether it is relevant and engaging enough that they will use it.
A Public Health Approach to Prevention
For Dr. Christine Yu Moutier, Chief Medical Officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), that question is deeply personal.
Dr. Moutier spoke candidly about experiencing a serious mental health condition while in medical school, in an environment where achievement and performance were deeply connected to identity and self-worth.
With treatment and support, she returned to medicine and later became a chief resident and dean. Her experience also changed how she related to others: physicians and trainees began sharing their own struggles with her. What had felt deeply isolating turned out not to be hers alone.
