I appreciate your thinking about the role masculine traits provide to buffer mental health problems (albeit a limited one). This may also shed insights on men’s draw to influencers who leverage personal interventions using the same packaging.
Now the challenge is to measure this dynamic effectively in men and women. I’d love to be part of that discussion. I look forward to reading the affiliated studies mentioned in the piece.
Thanks for this piece and all the other excellent work you do at Movember. It's always good to see research that avoids zero sum framings about women and men's health and wellbeing. Two quick comments:
1) There's a growing body of evidence from the response to HIV and AIDS that men's low use of HIV services has been about access not attitudes. When health facility hours and services have been made more accessible, men have used the services. The latest WHO & UNAIDS report Men and HIV: evidence-based approaches and interventions captures this well and has obvious implications for how we talk about men's use of and access to mental health services (i.e. that we should test our assumptions that it's primarily about attitudes when it might actually also be a lot about access).
2) I'm curious about the evidence for the inference/claim that strength, toughness, self-reliance and resilience are "masculine traits". Surely it depends on how we define those terms and whether we imagine toughness as the ability to step onto the streets despite the likelihood of sexual harassment or the possibility of assault, or resilience as the ability to contend with lower wages for equal work, or online harassment, etc.
I couldn't agree more that we need nuanced research that addresses the urgent mental health needs of young women and men and people of all ages and genders. I think we'll be more successful achieving that if we resist the allure of easy stereotypes.
I appreciate your thinking about the role masculine traits provide to buffer mental health problems (albeit a limited one). This may also shed insights on men’s draw to influencers who leverage personal interventions using the same packaging.
Now the challenge is to measure this dynamic effectively in men and women. I’d love to be part of that discussion. I look forward to reading the affiliated studies mentioned in the piece.
Thanks for this piece and all the other excellent work you do at Movember. It's always good to see research that avoids zero sum framings about women and men's health and wellbeing. Two quick comments:
1) There's a growing body of evidence from the response to HIV and AIDS that men's low use of HIV services has been about access not attitudes. When health facility hours and services have been made more accessible, men have used the services. The latest WHO & UNAIDS report Men and HIV: evidence-based approaches and interventions captures this well and has obvious implications for how we talk about men's use of and access to mental health services (i.e. that we should test our assumptions that it's primarily about attitudes when it might actually also be a lot about access).
2) I'm curious about the evidence for the inference/claim that strength, toughness, self-reliance and resilience are "masculine traits". Surely it depends on how we define those terms and whether we imagine toughness as the ability to step onto the streets despite the likelihood of sexual harassment or the possibility of assault, or resilience as the ability to contend with lower wages for equal work, or online harassment, etc.
I couldn't agree more that we need nuanced research that addresses the urgent mental health needs of young women and men and people of all ages and genders. I think we'll be more successful achieving that if we resist the allure of easy stereotypes.