Written by Celine Nguyen
Edited by Jocelyn Nguyen
Have you ever noticed how a male figure in your life, be it your brother, father, uncle, cousin, friend, or other, refuses to cry in front of people for fear of being shamed? It’s not uncommon, you know. People may preach that toxic masculinity doesn’t exist, but it does—people just don’t like to talk about it. So let’s talk.
Graphic by Liana Le, from Arts for Relief
In August 2018, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued guidelines to help clinicians improve the health of boys and men, declaring aspects of "traditional masculinity" "harmful."
This was only 2 years ago, and it was the first time in the organization’s history formal guidelines were established to address male mental health; the APA, the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, was created in 1892. Being a topic only professionally addressed after more than a century, male mental health awareness is understandably yet disappointingly low.
In this set of guidelines, the APA establishes certain aspects of “traditional masculinity” as “harmful.” They define it as traditional masculinity as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” This is also known as the phenomenon of toxic masculinity, which has typically led to poor health outcomes such as higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, violence, and early death due to the pressures that boys and men feel the need to conform to.
When the APA published its findings on the consequences of traditional masculinity, it was met with much criticism from conservatives who claimed that American men were being attacked. Let’s review the irony of this: the APA finally issues guidelines to improve male mental health by operationally defining the principle of “traditional masculinity,” but the report receives intense backlash from critics who claim that American men are being attacked because their masculinity is being jeopardized by this “new” definition. If you think about it, the foundations of the criticism that this report received are actually rooted in—you guessed it—toxic masculinity. Critics attempted to stop people from learning about this principle so that they wouldn’t be able to talk about it in both informal and formal settings. In a disturbingly similar way, toxic masculinity prevents people from talking about mental health in men despite its significance.
As a society, we normalize the brutalization of men and then tell them that their compensation is a more powerful position of authority.
They feel empowered to act the way they do, even if it’s at the expense of those around them and even their own mental health. This is not to say that all men are alike, as no demographic or population are ever completely alike. However, the desensitization that society has essentially imposed on men has made them susceptible to peer pressure as some men become dissociated from the very things that make us human. As USA Today reports, “The stereotypical sense of masculinity is at war with everything we know about what it means to be human. It’s muted suffering, even when we know talking through trauma is important for healing. It’s not expressing physical affection for other men, including male children, even though we know human touch is central to emotional well-being. It’s filthy jokes, flaunting sexual conquests, and insecurity disguised as bravado. It’s being taught that power is dominating others, rather than treating people as the full humans they are.”
That being said, it’s clear that toxic, or traditional, masculinity has negative effects on mental health in men. It stigmatizes crying, showing emotion, suffering, physical displays of affection, and more. It stigmatizes mental illness because mental illness tends to encompass all of these stigmatized aspects. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “Depression and suicide are ranked as a leading cause of death among men, and yet they’re still far less likely to seek mental health treatment than women.” Several psychologists believe this has to do with pressure to maintain bravado; a lot of men don’t want to admit they have a problem, and may even see mental illnesses such as depression as signs of weakness. The stereotypical pressure that men should be strong further stigmatizes and perpetuates mental illness due to the popularized belief that mental illness is a testament to your own personal inability to maintain fortitude; and thus male lives are put at risk without treatment.
So what does this mean for us, as a society?
Well, we must learn to prioritize everyone’s mental health, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, religion, and national origin. We need to work together to de-stigmatize mental illness and receiving treatment as a whole, but especially for men. This starts with educating yourself and your friends, families, and colleagues on the topics of mental health and illness, toxic masculinity, and suicide. So get out there, read, research, be kind, and help those who may be silently suffering or denying the fact that they have a mental illness in an appropriate manner. Mental health awareness may be centuries behind, but it is never too late for true societal change to take effect.
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