Stressed-out male
Mental health charity, Mind, has called for employers to do more to help stressed male workers and for the Government to produce a men’s mental health strategy. The call comes following Mind’s latest research that shows that men’s mental health is more likely to suffer as a result of the recession and that they are less likely to seek help.
The YouGov survey of over 2,000 men and women showed that 45% of men are currently worried about their finances and 27% are worried about job security, compared with 22% of women.
Mind says that men’s mental distress is a “hidden problem” and that up to 2.7 million UK men are suffering from depression. In the survey men were half as likely to talk to friends about their problems and only 31% said they would talk to family, compared with 47% of women. Men were also less likely than women to seek professional help.
The report makes ten key recommendations, including:
Health professionals should take gender into account when discussing treatment options.
Employers should learn to recognise the symptoms of men’s mental distress and introduce mental wellbeing policies.
The recession is clearly having a detrimental impact on the nation’s mental health, but men in particular are struggling with the emotional impact. Being a breadwinner is something that is still crucial to the male psyche so if a man loses his job he loses a large part of his identity, putting his mental wellbeing in jeopardy. The problem is that too many men wrongly believe that admitting mental distress makes them weak and this kind of self stigma can cost lives.
