THIS week, June 13 – 19 was Men’s Health Week, an annual event targeted at increasing awareness of male health issues on a global level and encouraging the development of health policies and services that meet the specific needs of men, boys, and their families.

This year’s theme for Men’s Health Week was ‘Building healthy environments for men and boys’ – focused on creating physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy environments in the home, workplace, and in social settings.

Doctor with a special interest and further training in psychological medicine, Mark Johnson has been treating local men in the health sector for more than two decades and said while he was starting to see a change in the way men view masculinity and their ability to open up, more work was still needed to encourage them to feel safe being vulnerable and initiating conversations about their mental health.

“The fact that just slightly less than half of my patient load are men is atypical,” he said.

“It’s not necessarily that men are incapable of getting help, it’s just they’re very selective about what kind of help they want.

“Men will open up to other people but they need to be very secure, they need to feel that it’s very safe before they’ll actually engage in that conversation … it’ll often take a man several meetings before he’ll actually begin to open up about what the problem might actually be.”

According to Dr Johnson, there are two main barriers that prevent men from being able to access health care which are accessibility, due to not many services being available outside the common working hours of 9am-5pm, and a deep-rooted culture of being independent and masculine.

To help combat this, Dr Johnson said he offers some appointments on Saturday’s, early morning appointments, and telehealth conferences, which benefit men that work out of town.

Dr Johnson said in order for more men to feel comfortable sharing their health with others, whether it be mental or physical health, more work needed to be done to reduce the stigma surrounding the concept of masculinity.

“I think now the message is getting through that there are good things and bad things about what you might call traditional masculinity, and we’re now beginning to understand that it’s quite acceptable to express feelings to another man or woman,” he said.

“Older men are still kind of trapped in that ‘I really just have to toughen up and get over this’ mentality.

“For older men, the way we have been enculturated in terms of our masculinity is that you don’t complain, you fix it and you are relatively independent.”

A survey of men across Australia conducted by Healthy Male, an information provider on men’s health, found that up to one third of men indicated they would not seek information about private health issues, with the top reasons why including ‘never talking about health issues’ and ‘not feeling comfortable talking about health’ (both recording 13 per cent of men surveyed).

The data also found that many men reported finding it difficult to start conversations about health with friends, family, and health professionals, which Dr Johnson said goes back to the evolutionary perspective of men being told not to express vulnerability.

“An environment that would feel safe for a man would be an environment where he would feel free to express his feelings with the knowledge that there would be no recrimination,” he said.

“So he won’t be perceived as being weak, or judged, or somehow less competent, or even less masculine.”

Dr Johnson said it was unfortunate the perception that vulnerability was negative was still present in workplace environments, with the “culture of replaceability” deterring men from being open with their struggles or emotions.

“People are not going to display any vulnerability at all in those cultures and sadly that is still many modern workplaces,” he said.

“If someone actually performs well in a workplace then that’s the expectation and in fact we now expect more and people are going to be very reluctant to talk.”

Suicide still remains a significant problem for men, with data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reporting that from 2016-2021 around three quarters of suspected deaths by suicide in Victoria were among males.

“Men typically like to be able to fix things and when they find that they can’t fix themselves or someone else they feel disempowered and that is an independent risk factor for suicide,” Dr Johnson said.

“So if a man feels helpless that might be the thing that actually leads him to take his own life.

“The most glaring statistic about men is that they kill themselves at four times the rate that women do.”

As a society, Dr Johnson said we can create safe environments for men to feel comfortable speaking about their health by normalising what it means to be human and all the emotions that come with that.

“The mental health sector struggles with this idea and that some things that we experience are not actually illness, so for a man to be able to grieve, to say that they’re uncertain about things, to express sadness or anxiety over life events, can be an absolutely normal experience and what unfortunately often happens is that it gets judged for being an illness,” he said.

“Many men feel that to admit anything like that is actually confronting illness, when in fact what they’re most likely confronting is normal.

‘It’s just that they’re never given the language or permission to explore that and no one’s ever reflected back to them that it’s a normal experience.”

For any men wanting to improve their mental health, Dr Johnson recommended the four key steps of getting adequate sleep, eating a nutritious diet, increasing movement, having a few people you feel safe speaking to, and being involved in the community.

He said going to the gym and participating in activities such as Park Run are a great way to increase social connections while moving the body in a capacity that’s comfortable for you.