Young men are a particularly vulnerable group in society. They suffer some of the most serious mental health issues of any group in Australia. Research has shown that only 13 percent of young men seek help for mental health issues, leaving thousands who stay silent. This is reflected in our headspace statistics with 60 percent of young people who sought help at a headspace centre being women and only 39 percent being men (one percent identified as either gender diverse, intersex, or indeterminate). headspace wants men to start the mental health conversation across Australia and recently launched its father's campaign, to help dads open difficult conversations with their sons. For further information check out this link.
A few year's back, a friend's brother was hospitalised after loading up his Commodore with a week's worth of beer, driving into the bush and drinking said beer, calling his boss and telling him he's a "fucktard," then coming home and self-harming in front of his wife and her sister, before collapsing on their couch catatonic, unwilling and unable to move. "I don't get it," his brother told me over drinks a week later. "He always seemed like such a good bloke."Much has been made of the toxic masculinity that forms the bedrock of Australia's national identity. How it has created generations of emotionally-stunted men seemingly forbidden from accessing their inner selves, and addressing the issues therein. We know where the rift between macho ideal and stark reality leads: domestic violence, misogyny, homophobia, racism, suicide.The bloke is a myth and peak blokeyness is, in turn, unattainable. The qualities that Australian men are conditioned to aspire to—being easy-going, brave, assertive—and what we are conditioned to expect from them is a convenient polyp of jingoism designed to excuse our national shortcomings: from failed wars to neoliberalism, from losing the Ashes to Nollsy, from Nauru to Don Dale.In short, the Aussie bloke archetype is shit and needs rebranding.Fundamental to this shittiness is the denial of emotion, and by extension, the denial of madness. Madness is difficult to deny within the Australian context when you come to accept its predominance as the recurring motif of our historical storyline. This goes back to the early days of colonial Australia. To exist as a settler in Australia then was to be mad. The early arrivals weren't scholars or cartographers: they were the transported poor—prostitutes, thieves, public nuisances—and in them ran a clear and earnest streak of madness, be it brought on by mental illness or the barbarity of deportation. The settler heading in to tame the untameable bush became a romantic notion over time, but in reality you had a starkly alien landscape that spoke only of isolation, futility, and death.Vikki Ryall, Head of Clinical Practice at headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation.