Boys do cry: The support groups freeing men from toxic masculinity

Together, men are rewriting the script on masculinity.
By Nikolay Nikolov  on 
Boys do cry: The support groups freeing men from toxic masculinity
Men-only support groups are trying to redefine what it means to be a man. Credit: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable

Shame. It's one of the most difficult topics to open up about, especially in front of strangers. And yet, it took center stage over and over again.

In more than a dozen community centers, makeshift spaces, and online meetups, men of all ages were coming clean, many for the first time — they spoke about being ashamed of their looks, their jobs, of being lonely, of feeling judged. That kind of vulnerability among men is difficult to achieve when the very notion of intimacy is a threat to their masculinity.

But that's exactly the point.

Men's support groups are popping up across the UK to get men to talk it out, offering them regular connection and community as they redefine what it means to be a man — together. This comes as mental health services are stretched dangerously thin by long-running cuts to funding and staff. Similar groups have been around for years but are increasing in popularity in the U.S., where free or low-cost healthcare services are limited to the elderly, people with disabilities, or poor (and there are plenty of exceptions). But they're not perfect.

HUMEN is one of the latest such groups to form in the UK. The mental health charity offers anonymous and non-clinical support meetings for men. The hour-long sessions are free and encourage groups of guys sitting in a circle to let their guard down and pour their hearts out. Its sessions, which are based on a different theme each week — adequacy, shame, fear, guilt — let members jump in freely.

Founder River Hawkins hopes HUMEN can provide other men the support he needed when he was at his lowest point. “I was rolling on rock bottom for about three months,” said Hawkins, referring to his long-term struggle with depression. At the time, his doctor referred him to a National Health Service (NHS) counselor. Hawkins, an actor who played a Gryffindor student in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was offered six free talking therapy sessions.

"The doctors told me, 'We can only give you more free sessions if you're suicidal,'" he attested. According to NHS guidelines, counselling usually consists of six to 12 talking therapy sessions. However, like Hawkins, many patients who subsequently sought support group help said they too were provided just six sessions. (An NHS representative didn't respond to inquiries about this discrepancy.)

Further counselling would cost money he didn't have, so he stopped going. Hawkins then decided to set up a space where men like him could go before they hit rock bottom.

Gary is one of those men. “I don’t know what I would do without the groups,” said the 37-year-old who struggles to live up to persisting masculine stereotypes. (Mashable agreed to alter the names of support group attendees like Gary, who opened up about sensitive subjects, to protect their privacy.)

At one meeting, Gary met a man who had never heard of HUMEN until earlier that day. “He had received some terrible news,” he said. “He saw a HUMEN ad on the tube [subway] and found himself sitting next to me within the hour.”

HUMEN works hard to market itself, both offline and on. A five-part documentary, featuring emotional interviews with actors like Fleabag's Andrew Scott and Golden Globe winner Bill Nighy intertwined with confessions from men from all walks of life, is just one example of their scope.

"There are so many aspects about being a man that are almost set in stone, like 'men don’t cry, men don’t talk about their feelings,'" Adam, 27, a regular HUMEN attendee and volunteer, said, "that you tend to unquestioningly put a lot of pressure on yourself and others."

Boys and men are often taught to block their emotions and automatically mimic an externalised playbook of what it means to be a man. As Liz Plank, author of For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity, said in a phone interview, "these pressures are encoded in men." Take, for example, shame: "a topic that we as women are increasingly comfortable being vulnerable with each other about," Plank said. "You realise that all men, at some point in their lives, have been ridiculed, mocked, or bullied for being weak, for being less of a man."

Support groups as a safety net

From prodded discussions about masturbation habits (self-pleasure is a huge source of guilt for both men and women) to more personal tales of self-judgment, these support groups offer spaces to confront life's brooding pressures.

Nearly a third of men said they have no friends at all.

Male loneliness and isolation is a concerning issue, particularly in the UK. A 2018 survey of over 2,000 men and women commissioned by the Movember Foundation, which raises awareness about men's health issues, found "nearly half (47 percent) of men are unable to confide in friends about their problems, compared to 63 percent of women who do." Nearly a third of men said they have no friends at all.

In 2018, 75 percent of those who died by suicide in the UK were men, according to a report by suicide prevention charity Samaritans. Suicide is complex and can have a myriad of causes. But risk factors include an unwillingness to seek help because of stigma and barriers to accessing treatment. Men tend to be less likely than women to seek help for psychological issues, researchers have found.

"Men simply don't to go to see the GP," said Paul Bannister, the founder of ManHealth, a charity support group network in northern England for men struggling with mental health issues. The organisation runs 10 support groups free of charge and sees over 100 men every week. ManHealth is funded by the National Lottery, which directs proceeds to raise money for various causes.

Bannister, who has struggled with depression and the social shame of talking about it throughout his life, said the men he works with are particularly hard hit. Rising unemployment among white, middle-aged men in northern England is directly juxtaposed with a working class identity of stoicism and strength. "They tend to bury their head in the sand until it's too late," Bannister said.

Men — and white men, specifically — often automatically benefit from the social, economic, and political order. At the same time, many are left isolated, frustrated, and vulnerable in their perpetual attempt to man up and fit in. This type of toxic masculinity equates toughness with power and emotions with weakness, leaving men with no outlet for their shame. Men are both desperate for a new model for masculinity and vulnerable to violent ideologies and blaming others, support group leaders and psychologists said.

The northeast of England was the region with the highest suicide rate for men in 2018, according to the Office for National Statistics. Since then, ManHealth groups have been expanding. "There's just nowhere else for men to gather and have that intimate contact with one another."

The spread of these groups reflects a systemic problem, too. The NHS, which offers a number of specialised mental health services, is overstretched. According to annual waiting times statistics for patients with mental health problems, provided to the BBC by the NHS, half had to wait over 28 days between their first and second session in the past year. At the same time, 1 in 6 waited over 90 days. The long wait times force people to seek alternatives.

"We’re almost an essential service, but we’re not publicly funded," Bannister said. "When a guy presents himself as struggling with mental-ill health, the general practitioners refer them to us." That's why their group leaders are certified Mental Health First Aiders who go through a rigorous amount of training, including suicide awareness courses. ManHealth, like most support groups, offers voluntary drop-ins that are accessible immediately and free of charge.

Department of Health and Social Care and NHS officials didn't respond to multiple requests for comment on extensive NHS wait times. As it stands, help to vulnerable people is being outsourced to small organisations — most often charities — which act as a last resort. And while all the groups mentioned here have protocols and crisis plans for flagging dangerous behaviour, they are a disproportionate response to a problem of this scale.

At the same time, their reliance on being volunteer- or peer-led raises questions about who is allowed to market themselves as a men's group guru. In the UK, specifically, private therapy is largely underregulated, which means nothing can stop you from operating as a therapist or a counsellor. Obviously, the same goes for support groups, too. Each of the support group founders I spoke with said the focus on a peer-led setting is strategic. By dispensing with the hierarchical and clinical setting associated with group therapy, men are more likely to come regularly, which is the ultimate goal.

But a system built upon therapy-adjacent group sessions and personal development coaching, with a trimming of self-help vibes, leaves the door open for hacks. In the wrong hands, priorities can shift from helping to moneymaking. Or from tearing down toxic masculinity to creating a subtle hiding place.

Masculinity in flux

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Men need to step outside the shadow of what masculinity used to represent. Credit: Bob al-greene / Mashable

Fredric Rabinowitz, the author of Deepening Group Psychotherapy with Men, said there is now a growing tendency for men to seek out spaces where they can say whatever they want without judgment from society at large.

"You know, the sort of 'I don't need to be told by some feminist what's right for me,'" the University of Redlands psychology professor, who ran his first men's support group in 1981 as a social experiment, said.

"I think it's actually coming out of a desire to be included, but a feeling of invisibility — they don't know how to play the game in a way and so they reject the game."

"Men do a lot of damage to themselves and others — it's just not healthy to live like that."

That rejection of the game has been weaponised by the Men's Rights Movement (MRM), which is essentially branded as an alternative support group for (mostly white) men who feel like they've lost their privileged position in society. Subreddits like r/MGTOW (which stands for Men Going Their Own Way) are framed like this, said Verity Trott, a lecturer at Monash University researching the culture of toxic masculinity. "Even Incel spaces have attracted young men who felt like misfits," said Trott. Toxic hate speech and discriminatory language dominate many of these online forums. That vocabulary then seeps into the real world, where men, self-identifying as incels, have perpetrated extreme levels of violence.

For proponents of the MRM, deconstructing the harmful effects of toxic masculinity effectively constitutes a war waged against men and everything that manhood has traditionally stood for.

“Men do a lot of damage to themselves and others,” Dan Doty, one of Evryman's co-founders said. Evryman, a for-profit benefit corporation aimed at helping men connect to their emotions, started with its first group in 2016.

Organisations like Evryman and the ManKind Project (MKP), a global nonprofit founded in 1985, are capitalising on this fraught moment. The core philosophy is that these organisations offer a prophylactic for the destructive discourse fueled by the MRM and its online and offline offshoots. And it's having an impact. MKP alone has support groups held in 26 countries (predominantly in the West), where they “serve around 10,000 guys weekly or biweekly,” said Boysen Hodgson, the communications and marketing director for MKP in the States.

"We're in the culture change business," Boysen said. "We're part of an effort to evolve the social culture of masculinity."

How far these ginormous organisations are taking their pledge to change the culture depends on who you talk to. Both Evryman and MKP have branched out beyond support groups to offer bonding experiences like weekend retreats and initiations — $475 to $975 for an Evryman retreat, $675 on average for MKP’s initiation.

The gender exclusivity and the "man"-heavy messaging encoded in all these organisations' names (HUMEN, MenSpeak, ManHealth, Andy's Man Club, Men's Shed, Evryman, ManKind Project, to name a few) is also notable. Indeed, these organisations have been criticised by equal rights activists and psychology professionals alike. The main concern is that while these groups aim to deconstruct the effects of toxic masculinity on men, they rarely consider the effect it has on women, too. For instance, discussions, debates, weekend retreats that brand themselves as seeking to battle toxic masculinity without broaching topics, like the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and the important role men have in actively battling against it, highlight cracks in the foundation. If the goal truly is self-reflection and evolution for men, then most of these groups don't go far enough.

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"They don't know how to play the game in a way and so they reject the game." Credit: vicky leta / mashable

These organizations all offer the same answer for why they're restricted to men. It's because the men admit they wouldn't feel as comfortable opening up if the groups were mixed. And that's part of the problem, really, because men shouldn't feel like they can only open up to other men.

Men's support groups shouldn't be a replacement for essential healthcare services, but, especially in the UK, many are. They shouldn't be the only places where so many vulnerable men find guidance and support, but often they are. For numerous men, these support groups, for all their limitations, can feel like their only option.

"I think these guys, especially the younger men, just want to be accepted and loved," Rabinowitz said.

If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, text Shout at 85258 or call 999 for emergency help in the UK. You can also contact the Samaritans on 116 123 or Childline on 0800 1111. If you’re in the U.S., text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Mashable Image
Nikolay Nikolov

Senior Producer, London.


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