Redefining Masculinity and Men's Mental Health

did mustaches go? What's going on there? They'd been working as admin and creatives doing a lot of breast cancer campaigns in that era, which was very, very big in Australia at the time, and really they started to go, who's talking about our health? Our wellbeing? Some of their mates had suffered with mental health issues, their dads had had prostate cancer, and so they started in earnest with

a couple. There was probably twenty of them. The month of November, they said, all right, who can grow the shittiest mustache year, Let's see how we go, and they brought them back. This was before you know, hipsters. Every man and his dog was growing the mustache for fun and I just looked like Bora when I grow one. But the the way in which it kind of moved really organically was it started out, you know, with a

couple of guys raising some money. They tried to share it with a couple of prostate cancer organizations who are like, who are you fuck off? This isn't happening. And then they came back the year after and they doubled the amount that they'd raised, and suddenly everyone started to you know, there iss started to prop up, and we went from strength to strength to the point where over the past you know, twenty one years or so, we have raised over a billion dollars. As a ment Health were the

largest men's health organization in the world. We operated in over twenty countries. We've got around four hundred staff. We've got offices in London, in la in Toronto, in Melbourne, and we, you know, have now moved beyond purely the practical joke of growing mustaches to to really changing the

face of men's health. We are fundamentally investing in thousands of programs in uh, you know, disadvantaged communities, in mental health, in prostate cancer, in men's health more broadly, just trying to actually galvanize the field and put money into research and programs.

with the girls and hanging out with the guys. And I felt.

I was a pretty weird kid, I guess, and being a third child, I think that that kind of happens. You just you pay attention to dynamics in strange ways and and try to peace make and all of that type of stuff. And so moving through my dad was a medical practitioner. I had a lot of interaction with at risk populations. He worked in Sydney's King's Cross. There was a lot of you know, heroin addicts and homeless people.

And I would go in, you know, once a week and work with him as a teenager and just be thrown in the deep end. And so I just had a lot of interaction with a lot of different people and a lot of different stories, and so psychology kind of, you know, I was really drawn to it as a profession.

But as I started in my undergrad. I was one of you know, a canful of guys in that degree, and there were like two thousand people there and just lots of girls, and most of the guys who were there were just there to pick up, like that's kind of how it went. So I was like, I can actually if I stick at this, I think something's going to happen here. And so I put in the time and I loved it, and I just I stuck with it.

You know, I was at UNI for like nine years, and throughout that journey, I just realized that no one was talking about man, no one was talking about masculinity. I was, you know, the only guy pretty much in my master's call where I was seeing clients, and I just kept seeing these guys come in and drop out. I kept seeing them be misdiagnosed. I kept seeing this glossing over of men's diverse, nuanced, intricate, beautiful lives, and so I just went, this is this is a bit broken.

And so my PhD just started to really open up that door and be like, why aren't guys seeking help? What does this look like? And eventually it became pretty clear that lots of men are seeking help heaps of guys are going to therapy, but they're just not talking about it or they're not getting what they actually want. And so I spent quite a bit of time actually then pivoting towards what happens on the other side of the door, you know, what is taking place in therapy

that is not hitting the mark. And that's how I kind of ended up in November. I sat down and had a discussion with the executive director there where I was like, you keep, you know, creating a movement that is getting guys to open up, to be more vulnerable, to have these conversations, but you're not checking what happens on the other side. You're not making sure that when they are vulnerable, what they are open, that someone is

ready to listen. Because inherently there's just this belief that the system will work and that's just not the truth. Like many many times men slip through the cracks, women do as well. And so I pretty much you sold to him. We need to make sure that clinicians are ready, that the system is ready, and we need to actually

adapt to men's needs. And so that's what November, you know, embraced me, and I became part of the team like six years ago, and from strength to strength, I've been able to take over our research team which is now in a number of different countries and looks at not only systems, it looks at masculinities, it looks at social media, It looks at all of these different things that are going on in men's lives and goes, how can we talk to them about what's happening and how can we

actually offer them something that they want, not what you think that they need.

you need messaging, you need structuring and scaffolding. You need a process that provides you with growth opportunities and provides you with a sense of aspiration and future orientation. And

the messaging at the moment is devoid of that. It is filled with this mentality of what not to do, what not to be, and it's a deficit focused view, which for all intents and purposes, despite the fact that there is a lot of harm that goes on, we cannot excuse the fact that, you know, men and boys are doing some bad shit across the globe, but we need to find a way to lean into the good, to exemplify the good, to talk about the fact that

there are silent heroes all over the place. You know, this idea that there are incredible role models in dads and teachers and grandfathers who are never on the front pages. It's just the dickheads who are on the front pages of the paper who take up all of our time. And that's where toxicity comes from. So I have a fundamental issue with that term. As you would expect, it's very harmful. It's not useful. It does not provide any

structure for young men to adapt their behavior. All it does is says, here is a blanket ban on this thing. That you have inherited and you now have no ability to change that at all. Like if it's said there are toxic elements to the way in which masculinity is socialized and you should try and consider this, that's a different ballgame. But the media will never purport that the narrative is just like this is broken, You're all fucked.

That's kind of how it looks at the moment. And that type of problem orientation without any solutions is exhausting, it's degrading to young men, and fundamentally, my main concern with the topic is that it does not make anything better if we are afraid of violence against women. Calling

men toxic will not fix that. That's my issue, and so I'm really focused on building up young men and showing them what is possible, in providing them with a manifesto of health and well being, rather than letting them be driven into the arms of these guys who have a really clear doctrine of life that is do this, do this, do this, date this woman, make this money, buy this car, get this job, And it's all about power and domination, and it is fueled by men's insecurity

and this feeling that they are constantly pressured to achieve something when in fact, really what we should be doing is going, hey, guys, life is very scary, it's tough, it's uncertain, but here is a path that we can all work walk together. Mah.

hear all of this stuff. Then they end up in this you know, shitty banter with their friends because they're now being force fed content that seems at odds with their values, and they leave with these ideas you know, that are pretty pretty dark. And so I think that what we should be doing is going, here is an offering for us to say to you, we believe that you have inherent goodness. We believe that this is what's

possible for you. Let's help you get there. Let's provide you with the path, rather than here is the badness, and we're going to assume that this is who you are.

actually was a medical doctor. He saw a lot of problems with boys and went into the whole heap of research and so all round the world and many many traditions a ride of passage for teenage boys to bring them into to manhood. And and he's saying, you know, that is missing in our lives in the Western world, and and actually has started this movement on ride passage, which is I think brilliant.

the Positive Masculinity movement. There's there's a lot of different school based programs that are trying to do this type of rights of passage in different ways because some of them are shorter, some of them are actually camps that are that are longer. It's it has taken off, and I think that we should also point out that the right of passage movement is a beautiful in many ways indigenous tradition and you know, going back to country, for instance,

is something that you hear about so often. Adam Good spoke about it when he was going, you know, through the horrible experiences that he was, you know, copying all of that racism in the AFL, he went back to country to try and you know, reconnect and that's something where you start to access your identity, access who you want to be and what you want, you know, your

life to look like. We've lost sight of that. And do I think that we need a really structured societal process for young men to move between boyhood and masculinity and manhood. Maybe not. Do I think that there needs to be a clearer discussion about how that period looks, who needs to show up, and what success looks like. Yesnally. And the right of passage as a concept I think is essential in many ways because you know, women go

through it biologically. You know, they have a literal turning point where they go to womanhood pretty quickly, and that happens mind and body for them, and there's a lot of conversation around it, thankfully now used to be. We have gone from a point where there probably used to be far more discussion for young men as they moved into that in manhood towards this let's not let's not in a way wake up the beast. Let's not have that conversation. We don't want to point at that. We're

just going to hope that it works out. And I think that that pluralistic ignorance in some ways that idea that if we just shy away from this thing and don't look at it, it'll just work out has really fundamentally failed. Rather than going we need to structure this. We need to make sure the boys have a sense of belonging, they have a sense of community values, they have a sense of service and altruism. And when I talk about masculinity, people always go, you can't define healthy masculinity.

All we can do is define toxic. And I was like, I can define healthy masculinity. It's focused on leveraging masculine traits flexibly, which is that things like service, altruism, you know, fatherhood, generative fatherhood. There are lots of different things that exist. Stoicism and self reliance in the right dose are extremely useful. I know you think you know long and hard about

hardiness and grit and toughness. All of this stuff, when applied effectively in the right time, at the right place, that is healthy, positive masculinityrit large and we should not shy away from having those conversations.

than a marketing failure. Like it's a damn good job, like you know you've got, especially in this day and age where everyone is being replaced with AI, I think I have pretty good future aspirations to exist as a therapist. I'm not being replaced anytime soon. And you know, you have stability, you get paid pretty well. There's just this

belief that it's women's work. And I think that that's a serious issue within our society that that type of sitting in someone's distress, in someone's life, you know, for a moment, is not considered to be men's work. I hope that we're going to see a shift and that more men are going to get into it. It's not because women cannot treat men. Let me be really clear. Women are just as good at offering therapy to men as men are. It's just that more choice is always better.

You know, you want more gay therapists, more indigenous therapists. You just want you know, greater Yeah, you know, diversity so that someone can always see someone who they want to. I think that that's really important. But when it comes to the therapeutic model, you know, you'd understand that it is. It's very much focused on emotional communication and vulnerability, two things that are like fundamentally at odds with the way

that we're brought up as men. In many ways, also, it's like, sit down and let's have an hour long face to face conversation about your deepest, darkest thoughts. Talk to me about your mother and your sex life, and every guy is like, damn that that is not where I want to be right now. And there are some, thankfully, who are into it, and there are many who are not socialized to that experience, and it's it's very uncomfortable

and foreign and unaccommodating in many ways for them. And so what I try to do and what this training that I've created through November with my team is called Men in Mind, which is like, how do we actually get therapists to upskill to realize that when men come into therapy, they have a lot of beliefs and expectations and attitudes and biases that are going to stop good therapy from happening. Also, you as a therapist have a

lot of beliefs and attitudes about men. You might be reading god knows what, and you've got toxicity running through your brain and then a guy all tattered up comes in and you've decided that he's a ship bloke. Yeah, And the issue is, as we said before, you end up with a self fulfilling prophecy where he's only going to show you what you're looking for. And so the

aim is to open this up. That's what the aim of this training is, which is to be like, let's actually make masculinity not just some commentary bullshit that we're reading constantly in our opinion pieces, but rather, let's go beyond adolescence, the show that everyone wants to talk about, and actually look at what is at the core here of this guy's distress, which is often the way he was brought up, the pressures that he has, the stress

that exists in his everyday life. And when I talk about the fact that therapy is in many ways a contradiction with masculinity, it's because many of these guys don't have mental health issues in the stereotypical sense. What they do have is situational stresses. They have financial distress and uncertainty. They have, you know, stress around unemployment, they have financial

relationship difficulties. You know. The number one risk factor for suicide in this country is not a history of depression. It's past six months separation.

they get depressed. For instance, there's a subgroup of men who don't go into this like sad, crying, worthlessness whole. They go into anger, irritability, and drug and alcohol use. They go into externalizing. They send all of their distress out onto the world, and it looks like men behaving badly, it looks like shit behavior. But in many instances it is a cry for help, and we just need to

get more attuned and sensitive. That's what gender sensitive treatment is being attuned to the fact that if this guy was brought up in this way with these parents, in this world, he is going to respond to his internal experience in this way.

because they are the future of our society. But when you look at base statistics, we need to pivot to start to focus on these guys because what happens is that there is a long term suppression of emotion, There is a long term breakdown in social connectivity. You know, the number of friends that those guys have drops off

a cliff. Yeah, And so very lucky that you've got at the vast majority of guys who are in that age bracket who have kids have very few people to call on when they're in a time of need, And so they get to divorce and their whole social scaffolding is gone. They literally don't have anything to stand on. No one is there to wrap around them. Their wife created all of the social events for them.

any mates, you're done. Like, it is essential that in you when you're eighteen, when you're twenty five, when you're thirty, no matter how important your job is, if you do not spend time on your social connections, your life expectancy will drop like that is the thing that keeps guys alive. You look at the Harvard Longitudinal Study. Consistently, the only guys who are alive in their nineties, regardless of whether they smoked, what their diet was, what their exercise was,

the ones who had quality relationships are still alive. That is essential, and that is why when you get to your mid forties and you have a separation, you don't have any friends around to call on when you're in a time of need. You have extreme shame around all of this that you have no vocabulary to describe, and you have stigma around gunotherapy or the therapist doesn't connect

with you. It's a pretty bad situation. So we just need to do a lot better at not only empathizing with those guys and providing them with structures, we need to make sure that they know that there are so many like them out there and that they can connect with one another. Because all they want, all of us want, all the time, is this sense of connection and belonging.

And so when guys go, oh, I don't want to pick up the phone, and guy seem nady, you know that's always I don't want to, I don't want to be vulnerable. I see nadiy blah blah blah. I'm like, mate, I know that all you want is to hang out with him, So like, we need to move past that shame response that I might look weak for asking for something when in fact your values are telling you I need this, This is important to me.

And the research shows that that is the single biggest predictor of PTSD and suicide and combat veterans is whether or not they have social networks that they use.

where is everybody? And that's literally what happens when men just get into their forties, they go, wait a second, I was having fun, all my mates are around, and I actually didn't water the seeds. I did not help my social life grow because it wasn't a priority. You need to make it a priority. I sound like I'm preaching here, but it's something that is so fundamentally simple and is so disregarded. And I think that this notion that like masculinity going your own way, being your own man,

is absolute bullshit. We are human beings and the way in which masculinity flourishes is when we are in tandem with other people.

not true. But it does take longer, it is more uncomfortable, it is more ful in many instances, and it's extremely foreign. And so for those guys who do more of that shoulder to shoulder, I think what's really important is that that doesn't need to go away. That can exist within the therapeutic setting. And this is what I try and teach in this program, which is that just because you

decided as a clinician, yeah, or you were taught. Actually I was always taught, and I was reprimanded if I did anything different during my Masters that you must sit in these two chairs. They must look the same. You must be at this angle, you must ask these questions. When I'm doing an assessment, I have to you know, have my clipboard, blah blah blah. Very quickly I was

like fuck this, like this is not happening. I went to Darwin from one of my placements, and I was working with young indigenous kids, and it's like, if you attempt to do any of that with them, you're done. Yeah, And it's a baptism of fire to really learn that very early, which was great. But what I do is is I do what is necessary to get to the same endpoint, which is to say, I've had ping pong

tables in my therapy room, I've had pool tables. I've played Call of Duty with young guys, like when their hands are busy, the ability for them to open up is profound. And so this is what I mean. The endpoint of interest is around openness and vulnerability and whatever way it looks, how you get there. They do not decide that it has to look like this. And so I think that our therapy, you know, I've done running therapy, there's adventure therapy, there's equine therapy. There are so many

different modes that are opening up. They're considered like crazy offshoots, you know, but really what should be considered crazy is the fact that we've decided that these four walls, this is how you're going to talk about your trauma, like wild And so I threw out the clipboard because I was like, if I can't look at him or if if I can't be there with him, he thinks I'm a robot and my first two sessions or so, I'm not going through his entire family history chronologically because he

doesn't talk like that normally. I talked to him about surfing for twenty five minutes and how the waves were this morning, and then in the last ten minutes he dumps because he's calm, he's relaxed, he's been able to be a human being. So just do what works and ask him what he wants, and if he doesn't know, co create it with him.

be beneficial. But they've created such strict bounds that we've ended up actually shooting ourselves in the foot.

that was their church. And then when they brought in the drink driving lots. If they had like more in a paint, that was it. They were, they were done. They'd lose their whole livelihoods. And he said they just stopped coming, and suicides massively spiked. So and that comes back to your early point about that that men need those social networks, and we all need the social networks, but.

It always goes there because it seems that that journey and all of the other distress that kind of sits in the middle, it's only the crisis that people are willing to kind of deal with, that's where they want to focus much of their attention when it comes to prevention. It is about those early times. It's about getting on this stuff around social connection, around relationship health, fundamentally, around making sure that they understand what rejection looks and feels like.

You know, this idea that we can't be in control and powerful and dominant of our relationships and in fact it's a push pull always and it will not always go your way. And learning how to regulate our emotions. I would say that that is the one thing that we are really struggling with as men, is our emotion regulation.

Everything kind of comes back to a sense of shame and failure, I think for many guys, Yeah, which is that I couldn't do this, I couldn't be this, I couldn't achieve what I thought was necessary, and there's all of these wood I should have could at things, and this ability to go in your own mind. Actually, this is what's happening right now. This is what I need to do. This is how I need to calm myself down. This is how I'm going to talk to myself in a way that's going to soothe me and help me

move past whatever this feeling is. Instead, what happens is that that feeling comes up and it is fundamentally intolerable for many of these guys because they have not been given the code to be able to actually respond to it. And so you go from a twelve year old who is you know, pre suspended for showing emotion in class rather than sat down and spoken to about what he's

feeling and thinking. And then he's an eighteen year old and he's drinking and drug taking and a girlfriend's just broken up with him, and there's just seemingly no way for him to overcome this feeling because it's just too much for him. To the thirty year old who's just had a kid and now he is suddenly in this new world and he has no ability to understand the extreme stress that he's feeling about being a protector and

a provider. It goes on and on and on, and at some point it just becomes too much for some people. And so what we need to do is get on it early. But it's also never too late, Like there are ways I've worked with sixty seventy year old men who have so much trauma about things that happened to them, you know, early on. And the thing about the Irish, which was so lucky to learn from is this poetry, this storytelling, this ability to make light of pretty dark situation.

And I think us men need to find a way to realize that is deeply masculine, to make meaning of what has happened to you, to describe it, to corral those internal pieces and actually regulate those feelings rather than try and push them further and further down with more drink. You know, because like alcohol is a huge thing. It's

extremely social for many guys. It's the thing that gets them out of the house, but they don't seem to have any flexibility and like I can do other things with my mates, you know, yeah, yeah.

that that that that you know, have limited effectiveness. So if you were czar of the universe, right, what what would you do?

need to focus on life skills. We need to focus on our emotional inner world in a way that is not feminized, that is not at odds with the way and we're we're brought up, but is actually directly tied to our sense of self and so doing values work, doing rights of passage, doing ideas of you know, spending a period a month you know at school, going who do you want to be? Not? What do you want to be? Not I want to be a five? This is always a thing that everyone is asking kids, what

do you want to be? It's who do you want to be? It's it's and how are you going to get there? And it's not about this aspiration of I need to be a CEO, I want to be an entrepreneur. That's what's killing us. It's this idea of achievement rather than that hard work of self determination and growth, you know.

And so what I would focus on is building up those course skills around making sure that our communities are actually interlinked and tightly bound in ways that they used to be for our grandparents, where people would have neighbors that they would talk to, God forbid, Like I don't

know where that went, you know, absolutely. You know, we can talk about tech and social media, like there's a whole thing going on there which is harming everybody and is leading to serious brain rot and an inability to actually be in the present moment. And anxiety is going through the roof with that as well. Let alone pornography

and all of these other situations which are really harming men. Pornography, gambling, alcohol, seriously undermining men's ability to show up for themselves and their families and so and that leads to this spiral, you know. And so if I am the Cizar, I am focused really heavily on connection, on understanding your emotional experience and being able to discuss and describe it, and making sure there are some schools that you know that I've worked with where every boy sees a psychologist once

a month. You know, we should have a public school system where I don't want to see you when you're sick. I have no interest in that be because when you're depressed, I need to actually like get you out of bed. I need to get you going to work. That's not therapy. Therapy is building you up. It's creating that resilient scaffolding so that you can continue on when you're down in the dumps. That's that's not where the work happens. And so it's really important that we actually see psychology as

dental care preventative. Once every six months, give me a give me a check up, check my gums. You know.

of benefit. It just so happens that we actually unraveled all of it rather than some of it, which I think is problematic. But what my Vember is doing, We've got programs all over the globe and we fund you know, some of the school based stuff. We fund a program and we created it called Ahead of the Game, which is a sport mental health and resilience training and so we go in. We're partnering with the AFL on this at the moment, and we're actually partnering with Gaelic Football

as well in Ireland. And what we do is we go into a club, into a community club. This is not elite, it's at the grassroots and you go in and you give a program on understanding and responding to your own mental health issues, building up resilience in these young guys. But something that we do that is so important is that we also train the coaches and the parents because you have to have the ecosystem because what happens.

And this is, you know, something that I'm learning a lot of in the violence prevention space is I do more of it. When you go and you tell a boy at thirteen, this is what you need to do to be a respectful man, and how to you know, not be misogynistic and violent and whatever. If he goes home and his dad is beating his mum, none of that matters. Build an ecosystem of health and well being and safety for a young kid, and he will feel like he exists within a place that makes sense. He

exists with rules that he can follow. He exists with an aspiration that he can achieve because his coach and his dad is playing the game with him, you know. So that's you know, one really key program that we're rolling out across the globe. And I continue to spend most of my time with my team researching how we can get this no do gap being a bit shorter, so knowing and actually implementing, because at the moment, it's just like Ivory Tower. Let's all sit up here and

churn out PhDs and they don't go anywhere. My team, who all have PhDs, are fundamentally obsessed with translation, and I need to make sure that when we find something, it gets into the hands of guys quickly. Yeah.

to talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences. I know we've got a limited time here, but I remember talking to Professor John Reid, who's done a lot of research in this sorry, and said that psychologists and therapists and survey said he did only twenty five percent of them ever ask somebody about whether they had adverse childhood experiences, and he's like, they are their biggest driver of mental

health issues. What's your thoughts on that and high and when do we intervene and how is that different from somebody who hasn't had those adverse childod experiences that are setting up their view.

and no one is willing to look at it. So whether it is violence in the home, whether it's sexual child sexual abuse which is amongst young men, and nobody, nobody is willing to call this out. It is so so common and it is having such untold effects across

the lifespan. If we get onto this stuff early, if we are willing to say we need to focus on our young people, we need to focus on children fundamentally and safeguard them from this stuff and build services for them so that we can actually nip it in the bud so that they're not the forty year old man who is now perpetuating violence because he knew nothing else.

He knew nothing else. There are so many ways that if we get onto this stuff early and we actually say this matters, This matters to us as a society to expunge this behavior and to make sure that children can live safely and happily as they should as children, and to not stigmatize them when they enter into a service with stuff like this, because that's what happened. They come in and they're just too complex, the behavior is

too disordered, et cetera. I really think that that is at the core of our future success here is going to be how we actually respond to child maltreatment.