Have your mates in mind and everyone else

Posted on November 11, 2024

It’s encouraging that these days more people seem increasingly comfortable in talking about mental health compared with previous generations. But just because admitting to poor mental health – depression, stress, anxiety – is no longer a taboo subject, it doesn’t mean we can rest easy.

There are so many good initiatives these days and many organisations set up to raise awareness and offer support that you might be forgiven to think it’s all ‘in hand’. Sadly, it’s not – nor to be frank, is it ever likely to be.

Men’s Health Awareness Month

Every November is designated Men’s Health Awareness Month and the reason it exists is found in some stark statistics. Obviously poor mental health can affect people of any gender, but outcomes are not equal.

Four in five suicides are by men, with suicide being the biggest cause of death for men under 35. In 2022, men aged 40 – 54 had the highest suicide rates in the UK. Nearly three quarters of adults who go missing are male.

Many often look at mental health as something other people have, that ‘mental health’ means ‘poor mental health’. I’ve always approached it as: everyone has mental health in the same way as everyone has physical health. Some people may be born with a physical impairment, but they will learn to live with it, adopt measures and practices to help mitigate against or overcome it.

There’s no person that I know that is going to go through life without a period of poor physical health. Every person is going to have a migraine, the flu, a cut finger, a twisted ankle, a decaying tooth and what we do is ‘deal with it’. We take tablets, we change what we are doing for a while, and we cope with it whether that’s through medicine from a doctor or pharmacist or trusting an old wives’ tale (chicken soup to cure colds!).

I also believe that the vast majority of people are born with reasonably good mental health. Again, those we don’t will try to cope with it to the point where others might not even know about their ‘condition’. But if you can define poor mental health as acting in ways that you wouldn’t normally act or doing things that aren’t ‘you’, then there is no one I have ever met where this doesn’t apply. Everyone will go through life with a period or periods of poor mental health – ‘up’ one day and ‘down’ on another. It’s how high is that ‘up’ and how deep is that ‘down’.

The construction sector

According to research by MIND a few years ago, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem during our lives. In construction that figure is one in three.

I used to work on construction sites and the fellas do talk about life in general and their personal feelings, but perhaps not in a profound way. I’ve also been training construction workers in health and safety for more than 15 years and in terms of only site managers that equates to around 1,500 people. I’ve noticed a change. Mental health used to be “someone else’s problem”, but I’ve found people do open up more now and “talk about it”. The stigma around it seems to have been reduced.

Over the years Courtley Health and Safety has supported CALM – The Campaign against Living Miserably – whose target audience is men around the specific issue of suicide. They send us leaflets, postcards and badges to leave in our training rooms.

Once, I was approached at the end of a day by a man who had attended a training session. He wanted to thank me, because he had read one of our CALM postcards and it had prevented him from taking ‘that’ ultimate step. So having someone to go to, or an organisation that has been signposted, like CALM, Samaritans or Mates in Mind not only saved his life but saves countless others too.

Our training over the years has changed too and now incorporates time spent talking about mental health and it’s so well-received and powerful.

Straws and haystacks

There isn’t an answer to this, but what Men’s Health Awareness Month does is raise awareness, not just around mental health and suicide but also testicular and prostate cancer. It’s there to encourage men to start conversations about their health and to seek support if they need it, to empower a supportive workplace culture which creates positive mental health.

Many little straws are probably not enough to stop someone in their tracks, but if they are not brushed off, they can lead to a haystack of problems. Talk, probe, keep talking and look after each other. It’s so important to check in with someone to prevent checking out.