Men Belong in the Conversation, Too: A Deeper Look at Men’s Mental Health
A lot is being said right now about healing.
Women are reclaiming voice, body, anger, pleasure, boundaries, softness, power, and community. The feminine is rising in ways that are powerful, necessary, and about damn time.
This does not move attention away from women’s healing. It widens the conversation, because systems do not heal in fragments.
If we truly want collective repair, we have to ask what happens inside the systems that taught women to shrink, endure, soften their anger, and carry everyone else’s emotional weight.
Men belong in the conversation. The same systems shape them. And so many are struggling.
In the United States, the suicide rate among males in 2023 was approximately four times higher than the rate among females. Males make up about half the population, but nearly 80% of suicide deaths. That should stop us. It should make us listen differently. (CDC)
Lately, I have noticed a shift in my own practice as a clinician. More men seem to be reaching for deeper work.
I want to say that with care, as I do not know if this is a larger cultural shift, or if I am simply noticing it more clearly from where I sit as a therapist. What I do know is that I am seeing men come closer to the doorway, often after the old ways of holding everything together have started to cost too much.
It can look like body pain, increased anger, a strained relationship, burnout, numbness, or the realization that “I’m fine” is no longer acceptable as the truth.
Current research does show that mental health treatment has increased overall in recent years. At the same time, men continue to be less likely than women to receive therapeutic support, and traditional masculine norms around self-reliance, emotional control, and stigma still shape whether support feels reachable at all.
Emotional expression, relational processing, asking for help, naming pain, and needing support have often been placed in the “feminine” category, while being more of a “man” has been tied to control, independence, endurance, usefulness, and pushing through.
That means many men were taught to experience therapy as a threat to the version of strength they were handed. For some, therapy doesn’t feel like support. It’s more like exposure. And honestly, no wonder some people would rather keep the armor on.
If therapy has only been imagined as sitting across from someone, talking directly about feelings, admitting vulnerabilities, and opening the past, hesitation is not surprising.
“I don’t need therapy.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“My childhood was fine.”
Any of those may be true. And also, the body may still be carrying a more complex story. That is not always denial in the simple sense. Sometimes it is the nervous system protecting the map it had to build to survive.
The problem is not simply that men “won’t talk about their feelings.” That is too flat.
The deeper question is:
What kind of world teaches a man that needing support is not ok?
“I’m fine”
A learned language.
Many of us have been taught that pain only counts if it is visible, urgent, or impossible to push through. If life is still moving, if people are still depending on him, if the bills are paid and the calls are answered, the story becomes: it must not be that bad.
Life may still be getting handled: work, family, responsibility, the fixing. From the outside, it may look fine. Hell, it may even look impressive. Underneath all of that, something may be tired in a way language has not yet caught up to.
Research on masculinity and depression points to externalized expressions of distress: anger, irritability, emotional suppression, substance use, risk-taking, overworking, avoidance, aggression, and withdrawal. A man may never say, “I feel depressed.” He may be pissed off all the time. He may stop caring, drink more, work more, shut down, or disappear.
Underneath the irritability, silence, or anger may be grief, protection, and a nervous system that learned being seen was dangerous.
Attachment theory gives us language for this. When early relationships do not make enough room for emotional need, the nervous system adapts. A child learns what keeps connection available and what threatens it. For some, the safest strategy becomes self-reliance and emotional suppression.
Those strategies can look like strength because, for a long time, they were. They helped him survive, become capable, and carry what had to be carried. But what helped him survive can start to limit the life he is trying to live now.
From a somatic lens, this absolutely makes sense. If vulnerability once led to shame, dismissal, punishment, or rejection, the body may not experience reaching for help as relief. It may experience it as a threat.
So he minimizes. Explains. Shrugs it off. Makes a joke. Keeps moving.
Safety gives those defenses less to do.
emotional silence
If emotional expression was never modeled or if it became unsafe early, the body has to adapt.
If sadness gets mocked, fear and tenderness get punished, and exhaustion gets ignored, how would someone know what to do with the parts of themselves that were never welcomed, named, soothed, or understood?
A man may carry years of unspoken pressure as shallow breath, guarded posture, chronic tension, restless sleep, digestive issues, headaches, high blood pressure, low libido, burnout, shutdown, rage, numbness, or the low hum of always being ready for something to go wrong.
This is not just mindset. It is biology meeting attachment, family systems, ancestry, culture, and gender roles.
The World Health Organization describes gender as socially constructed norms, roles, behaviors, and relationships that vary across cultures and change over time. So mental health is never only personal. It is shaped by inherited rules about strength, pain, work, intimacy, power, and need.
Stress, trauma, and the experiences we carry affect every area of the body. They move through the musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems.
It does not show up in every body the same way. Women are disproportionately affected by many autoimmune diseases, with one review describing autoimmune disease as occurring at about a 2:1 female-to-male ratio overall. Men show higher rates of hypertension overall in current U.S. data, and males have been nearly twice as likely as females to die from heart disease over the past decade.
The issue is not who carries more. It is how the body carries what life, culture, and survival have asked it to hold.
What gets pushed down does not disappear. It finds somewhere to live.
the doorway
Talking and having your story witnessed is a crucial part of the therapeutic process.
But honestly, telling the story is not always the same as feeling what the story carries.
Some people can describe what happened with insight, detail, even humor, and still be completely disconnected from the emotional charge underneath it. The words are there. The body is somewhere else.
That can make it feel like there is nothing there. No grief. No anger. No fear. No need.
But from a somatic and attachment lens, that “nothing” may not be emptiness. It may be distance. Protection. A nervous system that learned how to report the facts without entering the wound.
For someone shaped by emotional suppression, trauma, pressure, relational shame, or early attachment wounds, naming the deepest thing too quickly can feel exposing before it feels healing.
Protection can be sneaky and powerful. It may show up as joking, intellectualizing, fixing, going blank, minimizing, getting defensive, changing the subject, or leaving the room internally.
We often call this resistance, but truly, it’s the system doing exactly what it was built to do: protect.
A review on masculinity and help-seeking for depression found that conformity to traditional masculine norms can shape how men experience depression and whether they seek support. The authors also note that tailoring clinical approaches may improve engagement with care.
The doorway has to be safe enough to enter.
If sitting across from someone and naming your deepest feelings sounds like a hard pass, that does not mean deeper work is off the table. It may mean the way in needs to be different.
For some, emotion becomes more accessible through movement, humor, doing, side-by-side connection, rhythm, music, breathwork, creating, walking, nature, or silence.
the wound
This is where the conversation can get messy. The deeper work usually is.
Many expressions of cultural masculinity are harmful. Domination, contempt, violence, control, and emotional suppression cause real harm. That has to be named clearly.
And still, masculinity itself is not the wound.
The wound is disconnection: from the body, tenderness, grief, relationship, purpose, the earth, and the younger self who learned too early that need was dangerous.
Healing does not require becoming less yourself. It requires more room to become whole: strong and supported, protective and emotionally awake, fierce and relational.
Integrated, not fragmented.
Because what gets pushed down does not disappear. It often comes out sideways in ways that can be harmful.
men belong here, too
While UnEarthed is not centered specifically on men’s mental health, we are listening more closely.
We can feel the shift.
As women reclaim bodies, voices, boundaries, rage, pleasure, intuition, and power, men are also being invited into a different relationship with themselves. That invitation can feel disorienting. There may be grief around roles they were handed but never truly chose. Fear of getting it wrong. Loneliness underneath old scripts that once looked like strength.
This does not excuse harm. It makes room for repair.
We do not heal systems by dehumanizing half the people inside them. We heal by telling the truth with enough courage to stay relational.
This conversation can honor women’s healing, require accountability, and still make room for men to be seen as people with bodies shaped by culture, nervous systems shaped by pressure, and younger parts that may have learned too early that need was dangerous.
Support does not have to begin with having the perfect words. Sometimes it begins with noticing that the old way of carrying everything is getting heavy.
The question I keep coming back to is not only:
Why won’t men go to therapy?
It is also:
What kind of world taught a man that needing support meant failure?
And more personally:
What did you learn would happen if you needed someone?
These questions open the deeper room. They ask what your body learned to call weakness, what your family called strength, what your culture rewarded, and what you had to bury to become useful, respected, safe, or loved.
I do not think this conversation gives us easy answers. But I hope it gives us better questions.
Because men belong in healing, too - inside accountability, inside repair, inside the deeper work of becoming whole and shifting out of old systems.
As Earl C. Kelley wrote:
“We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. Indeed, we sometimes feel we have not completely answered any of them. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel that we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.”
A note from UnEarthed:
If this stirred something in you, or if you’re curious about what support could look like, you’re welcome to reach out. This conversation is still unfolding, and we are listening.
You can reach me at laura@unearthedtherapyandyoga.com
