Men’s Mental Health Week: How Roles and Routines Hide Men’s Mental Health Struggles

With Men’s Health Week approaching (15th- 21st June), Ryan Erispe, Head of Clinical at The Cabin, Drug and Alcohol Rehab in Thailand highlights the lesser-known aspects of men’s mental health struggles.

While we tend to imagine crisis as a dramatic and recognisable event, collapse, anger, addiction, burnout, visible breakdowns and struggles, many overlook the ongoing suffering of men because they seem to be functioning so well.

Ryan comments: “We see the crisis, the breakdown, the fallout, and many always seem surprised. “But he was so successful,” or, “he seemed completely fine.” Many men who are struggling are still functioning remarkably well.

They are productive, disciplined, and successful. They train regularly. They provide for their families. They show up to work. They answer emails. They make jokes. From the outside, they often appear composed, capable, and highly driven.

The reality is sadly quite the opposite. Internally, many men are fighting silent, stoic battles. They are exhausted, psychologically disconnected, and quietly reliant on external, unhelpful forms of regulation to help them avoid themselves and their world. Modern male dysfunction often looks socially rewarded before it looks clinically concerning

How patriarchy hurts men’s mental health

Many men do not experience distress through emotional collapse alone. They experience it through over-functioning, through performance, through compulsive productivity, through becoming useful to everyone except themselves.

This is the less talked about impact of patriarchy on men. We are socialised to provide first and cope secretly. Anything less than an exceptional performance of capability and success is shamed, not just by men, but by women too.

Most men do not break down. They slowly disappear into roles, routines, and expectations. Many do not get validated, seen, supported, or helped until it is too late. Suicide rates among men continue to rise despite the revolution in awareness around men’s mental health. Why is this? Ryan believes it is because the system still punishes men for taking up emotional space.

Men often feel they are dealing well emotionally when discussing the condition of their external world, such as“The business is doing well”, “The kids are in private school”, “I got promoted”, “We’ve just bought a house”,“Training is going great.”

These are not evasions in the manipulative sense, many men have learned to assess wellbeing through functionality, stability, and performance long before they ever develop language for their internal world. Pause and consider when last you heard a man in your life share his internal experience beyond “fine,” “tired,” or “stressed.”

Understanding emotional disconnection in men

For some, this way of being becomes so ingrained that emotional disconnection can remain invisible not only to partners and friends, but sometimes even to trained clinical eyes. The man himself may have little conscious awareness that anything is wrong because the system is still operational. Until eventually, it is not.

This is one reason why male mental health concerns can be difficult to identify early. Many men have been taught, directly or indirectly, that their worth is tied to what they produce, provide, or endure. If they can still perform, they assume they must still be okay. Few are even aware that functioning is not the same thing as wellbeing.

A man can be highly productive while being profoundly disconnected from himself emotionally. He can be admired professionally while feeling entirely unknown personally. He can appear disciplined while privately using work, alcohol, pornography, gambling, training, social media, or constant stimulation to regulate anxiety, shame, loneliness, or emotional emptiness.

The addiction process begins long before the substance. By the time many men consciously recognise distress, they are often already deep in exhaustion, addiction, isolation, compulsive behaviour, relationship breakdown, or psychological collapse.

This struggle frequently becomes visible further down the line when the progression of unhelpful coping has become entrenched or harmful, or when the person experiences significant distress.

Importantly, these patterns do not emerge in a vacuum. For many, emotional suppression, hyper-competence, and relentless self-reliance began as adaptive survival strategies. They were linked to safety, belonging, usefulness, and protection from shame or vulnerability. This is a painful function of the way men are socialised.

Young boys are shamed for anything that resembles emotional openness or healthy pause. Over time, however, what once helped a man survive can quietly prevent him from connecting fully with himself and others.

This is partly why simplistic narratives around masculinity can miss the mark. The issue is not simply that men “do not talk.” Many men communicate distress indirectly all the time through humour, irritability, withdrawal, overwork, obsessive training, emotional numbness, or relentless self-improvement.

Overarching narratives about mental health and coping today prevent men from being heard in their desperate attempts to show their distress. It is unreasonable to expect someone who has been repeatedly shamed for vulnerable expression to communicate suffering in a clear and healthy manner.

What is often missing is not language alone, but environments where honesty does not feel humiliating. At the same time, modern culture increasingly rewards the very behaviours that can mask emotional struggle. Hyper-productivity, optimisation culture, and performative self-discipline are often celebrated unquestioningly.

Some men have learned to optimise everything except their capacity for connection. Therefore, loneliness remains one of the least discussed aspects of male mental health.

Loneliness in men

Research consistently shows rising levels of loneliness among men, while men continue to account for the majority of suicide deaths globally. In many countries, men make up roughly three-quarters of all suicides despite being significantly less likely to seek psychological support early. These statistics should force us to think more carefully about what male distress actually looks like in practice. Not every struggling man looks broken, sometimes he looks highly competent.

This does not mean ambition, discipline, or achievement are unhealthy, far from it. Meaningful work, physical training, responsibility, and purpose can all be deeply protective for mental health. The problem arises when performance becomes the only acceptable place a man is allowed to exist. Eventually, many men reach a point where they no longer know who they are outside of what they do, where they are unable to see their inherent worth and accept their vulnerable parts.

Ryan comments: “Real psychological health is not simply about emotional expression. It is about the ability to remain connected to oneself while still engaging meaningfully with life, work, relationships, and responsibility. It is about developing the capacity for honesty without experiencing it as weakness. Many men do not need rescuing from collapse, they need permission to stop performing long enough to be known, heard, validated, and truly seen”.