MenTal(k) Health: 'This 'man up' phrase is so problematic'

Many men don’t talk about their health to the point where it can be damaging.

MenTal(k) Health is a weekly series that speaks to men, and those who identify as men, who have something to say about everything from mental health and well-being to fitness and sexual health.

It’s time to open up the conversation.

Psychiatrist and author of Ten to Zen, a guide to quietening the mind and giving your brain a mental workout, Owen O’Kane hates the phrase ‘man up’ as he feels it has a negative impact on the way men see themselves today.

He says the phrase is ‘bizarre’ but it is fresh in his mind.

He tells Metro.co.uk: ‘I had this conversation earlier with someone who flippantly said that men need to “man up”.This expression is so problematic. I asked him what he meant by that and he said “well we’ve got this generation now, that we can’t say anything to them.”

‘Then I asked, “Well what does ‘man up’ mean, then?” and he said “people just need to stop and take stock of what they have and appreciate it. They’re calling it depression, and they’re calling it that…but they just need to man up.”’

It’s a clear point of contention for Owen. Many people of a particular generation seem to dismiss mental health issues as weaknesses.

He explains: ‘This is not about ‘manning up’. The man I was speaking to has clearly never watched somebody with genuine depression and the impact it can have on their lives. I think we need to take stock and understand how these expressions have an impact on the way we think about men and their health.

We need to take stock and understand how these expressions have an impact on the way we think about men and their health

‘It’s about being understanding and compassionate to people who are suffering because it can be debilitating to somebody.

‘Part of the problem is that people often suffer in silence. They worry that if they share this, that’s the kind of response they’re gonna get. My job is to go the opposite way and say “Let’s talk about this because loads of people are feeling this way, lots of people are experiencing it and it’s not a weakness”.

‘If you saw a young lad who had a physical illness and was in pain, you wouldn’t dream of saying to him “Oh man up”, yet you hear this language being bandied around. Younger guys are very susceptible to this, and the figures are really clear.’

Owen grew up in Northern Ireland, where the suicide rates are high. While women are more likely to self harm, men are three times more likely to die by suicide.

‘The suicide rates are astonishing,’ he adds. ‘There’s an urgency about these conversations in getting people comfortable and breaking down the myths because people are dying.

‘I think that’s partly down to cultures where there isn’t a tradition of truth telling, seeking support and talking and I think it’s important that we start to break the stigma.

‘Growing up in Northern Ireland, I know what it’s like not speaking openly or truthfully and those days are gone – we need to start breaking that down, and stop encouraging people to do the opposite.’

Living in Belfast during The Troubles, Owen feels he had a unique sense of what anxiety meant. He explains it was one of the reasons for his book, Ten to Zen.

‘I often joke about a lot of what I learned about mental health, because I grew up in Ireland and you could understand anxiety when you live in a bit of a warzone. I think it was a combination of everything to create a programme that could be comprehensible for people to use,’ he says.

Owen is a psychiatrist. He has used his training to work in palliative care, looking after for people at the end of their lives.. He says people spend a lot of their time in regret and wondering how they could have done things differently.

Using his experiences, he began to devise the Ten to Zen programme, a guide to finding ten minutes in your day to give the mind a need workout, as on a typical day the brain gets taken for granted.

‘It’s not just ten minutes out, because anyone can do that, but these ten minutes are you actually doing something.

‘I call it a ten minute mental work out. We’re all driven 24hrs a day by the content of our brains, but most people don’t stop to think that it could use some maintenance, well-being or rest.

‘I created this programme with techniques to quieten the mind and to strengthen it. When you look at the brain as a muscle, you need to strengthen it.

‘The techniques in the first part of the book are about how you get rid of the noise and how to work on a brain that requires more flexibility to get you through life.’

There was a need. People were contacting Owen, asking for practical things to help with their mental health and dealing with the anxieties day-to-day life.

‘There was a theme coming through where people would say, “could you just give me stuff that I can use every day, practically that would help me function.” That gave rise to creating a concept that would be practical and useful for people to use.’

When putting together the programme, Owen found that men have a lot more difficulty with self-criticism than the women on his course, which  makes it difficult to communicate and create healthy dialogue for emotional well-being.

He said: ‘A lot of people struggle with the critical voice. They learn patterns over the years through family and experiences, or they have just developed ways to criticise themselves.They accept it as the norm.

‘I get people to take a step back and say “if this was your partner or someone you love, you wouldn’t speak to them that way, so why would you speak to yourself that way?”

‘With that they can start to begin to let this go embrace themselves and stop beating themselves.

‘Negative emotion is deemed a weakness – they say “I shouldn’t feel like this, I should be controlling, I should be strong, I should be the alpha male, I should be able to cope.”

‘But who said that? That we as human beings should be all of those things?

‘My argument is that all of the other emotions come up, but vulnerability, feeling weak, feeling strong, feeling sad don’t. We feel all of these emotions for a reason, and we have to signpost them so we can identify them again.’

In most cases, men try to prioritise the happy emotions and ignore the sad ones unless channeled through to anger and aggression.

Human emotion, is human emotion.

‘We all experience stuff. Culturally, in countries like Britain and Ireland, we believe men should respond in a particular way and that there are certain emotions that are deemed more acceptable for men. You look in magazines and see the stereotypes of what a strong male should be –  we never see stuff like vulnerability. Human emotion is human emotion.’

In 2019, Owen says one of the biggest things that has an impact on mental health is social media, given that it is a place that challenges how people, young and old, perceive themselves in some instances.

‘When I was in my twenties, we didn’t have this explosion of social media that we have now. There wasn’t anything to compare yourself to. As time has evolved we’ve become more insightful and much more aware than we were 20 years ago. We’ve evolved, we use more language and have become more intelligent. We have a lot of instability.

‘For adults trying to grow up and find their feet, it’s not the easiest place to try and do that. For people growing up such as millennials it’s a difficult time.

‘If we look around at social media and magazines…everything is glossy. There’s this real need for perfection, and people look to that as the ideal which is creating a lot of mental health issues.

‘When young people are asked what they want to be when they grow up, the majority say they want to be famous and it’s interesting because nobody is comfortable with ordinary every day living – it’s always something different.

‘They want to be a footballer, a movie star or something but it seems to be we’re starting to believe in the myth that everything is magical and glossy and glittery. That isn’t the real world.

‘More people are talking about it now, so does that mean that there are more people that are dealing with it now, or are people just finding the courage to talk about it?

‘Has this always been around or are we now in a situation where people are reaching breaking point? That conversation is happening now.’

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