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Societal 'Real Man' Mindset Still Strong — So Is Untreated Mental Illness With Too Many Males [1]
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Date: 2022-07-05
EVEN in this day and age, there remains much platitudinous lip-service when it comes to proactive mental illness prevention as well as treatment.
Various mainstream news and social media will state the obvious, that society must open up its collective minds and common dialogue when it comes to far more progressively addressing the challenge of more fruitfully treating and preventing such illness in general.
But they will typically fail to address the problem of ill men, or even boys, refusing to open up and/or ask for help due to their fear of being perceived by peers, etcetera, as weak/non-masculine. The social ramifications exist all around us; indeed, it is endured, however silently, by males of/with whom we are aware/familiar or to whom so many of us are closely related.
Albeit perhaps a subconscious one, a mentality persists: Men can take care of themselves, and boys are basically little men. It could be the same mindset that might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal only included one male among its six interviewed adult subjects, there presumably being such a small pool of ACE-traumatized men willing to formally tell his own story of childhood abuse. It might be yet more evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mentality, one in which so many men will choose to abstain from ‘complaining’ about their torturous youth, as that is what ‘real men’ do.
Without doubt, writes the author of The Highly Sensitive Man (2019, Tom Falkenstein, Ch.1), ‘real-man’ conformity stubbornly remains. There are “numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the ‘strong man’ is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. In the face of problems, men tend not to seek out emotional or professional help from other people. They use, more often than women, alcohol or drugs to numb unpleasant feelings and, in crises, tend to try to deal with things on their own, instead of searching out closeness or help from others.
“While it is true that a higher percentage of women than men will be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or a depressive episode, the suicide rate among men is much higher. In the United States, the suicide rate is notably higher in men than in women. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men account for 77 percent of the forty-five thousand people who kill themselves every year in the United States.
“In fact, men commit suicide more than women everywhere in the world. Men are more likely to suffer from addiction, and when men discuss depressive symptoms with their doctor, they are less likely than women to be diagnosed with depression and consequently don't receive adequate therapeutic and pharmacological treatment. ...
“This is backed up by numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the ‘strong man’ is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. In the face of problems, men tend not to seek out emotional or professional help from other people. They use, more often than women, alcohol or drugs to numb unpleasant feelings and, in crises, tend to try to deal with things on their own, instead of searching out closeness or help from others.”
Meanwhile, I’ll contemplate whether alpha males' sexual aggression in general could be related to the same constraining societal idealization of the ‘real man’, albeit perhaps more subtly than in the past: He'd likely be stiff-upper-lip physically and emotionally strong, financially successful, confidently fights and wins, assertively solves problems, and exemplifies sexual prowess.
But maybe society should be careful about what it collectively wishes for.
Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn-in as president, a 2016 survey of American women conducted not long after his abundant misogyny was exposed to the world revealed that a majority of respondents nonetheless found him appealing, presumably due to his alpha-male great financial success and confidence.
As for the guys some would describe as being on the other end of the 'real man' spectrum, a Toronto Now article I read [June 24, 2020] was headlined “Keep Cats Out of Your Dating Profile, Ridiculous Study Suggests” and self-explanatorily sub-headlined “Men were deemed less masculine and less attractive when they held up cats in their dating pics, according to researchers”.
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