Conformity to masculine norms tied to higher levels of harassment in public, and expectation that mental help will be hostile to one’s core identity due to demonization of men for decades.
i can understand the second part of your statement, but the first part confuses me. are you saying that you'll be harassed more in public for being gender conforming vs e.g. wearing a dress? or do you mean something else?
I only have time to scan the article, but did they control for cost? That would seem to be a primary deterrent for anyone seeking any kind of medical help in the US. We simply can’t afford treatment even with insurance and can’t risk becoming trapped in our profit-making medical-industrial complex with unstoppable lifetime prescription drugs.
The sample was predominantly white (66.3%), heterosexual (85%), and well-educated, with 41% holding a college degree. Political affiliations varied, with nearly half identifying as Democrats.
Not a demographer much less an American but comparing to the general US populations white is slightly overrepresented (population is 60%), 85% heteros actually checks out if people are identifying correctly, that is, no bi erasure, otherwise heteros are under-represented, 41% college degree is low, 61.28% have an associate degree or higher. Still that doesn't say anything about how much you earn, squinting at it the biases aren't strong enough to discount the results.
If anything the issue is 326 participants on top of that online.
The conformity to masculine norms was measured using the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory-30, which covers aspects such as emotional control, winning, playboy behaviors, violence, heterosexual self-presentation, pursuit of status, primacy of work, power over women, self-reliance, and risk-taking.
...that's a very mixed bag, toxicity-wise.
Interestingly, the direct link between traditional masculine norms and depressive symptoms was not significant.
Duh because the symptom descriptions in the DSM-V are female-centric. Same stuff in men first gets undiagnosed because it surfaces as frustration, not lethargy, then at some point you get a burnout diagnosis. Well, either that or you take up farming or something.
However, specific facets of masculine norms, such as heterosexual self-presentation, power over women, and self-reliance, were significantly associated with higher help-seeking self-stigma.
Self-reliance is the key thing to address here, I think, the rest I estimate to be correlation, not causation. And it needs to be addressed properly, because it's the one that hivemind doesn't really get: No it's not a bad thing. Also, no, you don't need to be the undisputed master of the universe. It's also the part where even otherwise progressive women promote toxic masculinity to a significant degree, you all know the "I opened up once about my problems and I'm never going to do that again" type of stories. I can't even fathom how much would change if the default reaction instead was "Don't know what to do? Call a male friend of his to take him fishing". In the meantime, let's be self-reliant and take people fishing without their SOs calling.
“From a positive psychology perspective, clinicians are turning to a strengths-based approach to encourage and reinforce positive masculine traits (Englar-Carlson & Kiselica, 2013), which may help to reframe help-seeking as an action of strength instead of weakness, thereby encouraging men to seek support for mental health when they need it.”
Yes! Apes together strong. Tough challenge, though, with the current degree of alienation and, especially in the US, rugged individualism. OTOH we don't need no psychologists or access to therapy to frame things like that.
I don't think the "US sucks at the availability of therapy" angle is wrong, as such, it's definitely a huge factor -- but it's probably also not the most efficient leverage point to change the system. That's always the issue with reductive analysis: You might spot a real issue, a very core issue indeed, but the solution often doesn't lie with the core issue but among factors which enable it. In this case, voter's attitude to availability of care would certainly change if "that's for losers, also, fuck you got mine" wasn't as predominant a social force.
Great points and I agree. The tiny non-representative sample, which I missed so thanks, should make it difficult even to use this for framing the hypothesis of a proper study.
I still suspect that cost is a major barrier in seeking care. Until we address that, it won’t matter what we do about the other factors.
I still suspect that cost is a major barrier in seeking care. Until we address that, it won’t matter what we do about the other factors.
Addressing things on a non-clinical level also reduces the need for therapy in the first place. Bluntly said if you can get someone who's frustrated to delete facebook, get a different job, and deliberately refrain from grabbing butt while hugging his wife (non-sexual body contact works wonders for libido) before they spin out of control they, well, don't spin out of control.
Prevention is always better than therapy and while shit life syndrome is unavoidable under the current material conditions, it's not like this is North Korea we're talking about. There's options to reduce the shit to tolerable levels for most people, no need to dive head-first into the latrine.
If I could add one thing to presidential debates it would be making the participants life a 40lb test weight like they do when you interview with a shipping company. People don't have to care about how well they do, I would just like to see it.
One of the most interesting things about Trump is that you never have to mention his name; just describe something third rate or inane and people know.
Right after the 2016 election there was a panel discussion that included the creative teams behind all the biggest political shows on TV. House of Cards; Veep; The West Wing; Scandal, and all the rest.
Every person up there said the same thing; if they'd had a character who said that 'he liked soldiers who didn't get captured' the networks and advertisers would have demanded that the character be shown as being hated by all Americans, and thrown into the gutter.