Mental Health Awareness Month Misses Men

Every May, the social media graphics go up. The green ribbons come out. The workplace workshops and symposiums conclude with the same essential pitch: it’s okay to not be okay, reach out, you’re not alone, help is available.

And for a lot of people, that message lands. It matters. It saves lives.

For a significant portion of the population, it largely doesn’t reach them at all. And the numbers to prove it.

Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. In 2022, men accounted for nearly 80 percent of all suicide deaths in the United States — roughly 38,000 lives. Meanwhile, men are significantly less likely than women to have received mental health treatment in the past year, less likely to have a regular therapist, and less likely to tell anyone they’re struggling before the struggle becomes a crisis.

We spend an entire month raising awareness about mental health, and the demographic most likely to die from untreated disease is the demographic least reached by the conversation.

The messaging is off.

The imagery, the language, the entire emotional register of most Mental Health Awareness Month content is calibrated toward an audience that is already somewhat culturally primed to engage with it. Vulnerability as strength. Feelings as something to be named and shared. Community as the place you turn when things get hard. These are great ideas, but they are incomplete ones — incomplete because they assume the person on the other end of the message has been taught that reaching out is an option.

Most men haven’t been taught that. They’ve been taught the opposite. Quietly, consistently, from early childhood forward.

The consequences of that show up in the data. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports that men are more likely to use lethal means, less likely to have disclosed their intent, and less likely to have been in any kind of treatment prior to death. They don’t show up in emergency rooms having survived an attempt at the rates women do. They show up in morgues.

This is sometimes called the gender paradox of suicide: women experience higher rates of depression and attempt suicide more often, but men die from it more. The gap between attempt and death is, in significant part, a help-seeking gap. Men reach the crisis point without having touched the system that might have interrupted it.

What would a Mental Health Awareness Month that actually reached men look like? It would look less like a feelings conversation and more like a performance conversation. Messaging would focus on sleep, productivity, decision-making, physical health, relationships — the things men are already paying attention to — and connect the dots to what’s happening underneath. It would use the language of function rather than the language of emotion. Not because men can’t handle emotion, but because meeting people where they are is how you actually reach them.

It would stop treating help-seeking as a personality trait and start treating it as a skill that can be taught, modeled, and normalized by the men who’ve actually done it.

May is just about over and and we will move on to a new set of ribbons and memes. But June doesn't have to mean silence. It can be a course correction — a chance to take everything the month got right and aim it more deliberately at the people it missed. More directness. More language about function and performance and what it actually feels like when things are falling apart without the vocabulary to name it. More men who've been through it saying so out loud, in plain language, to other men who are in it right now.