Why
Men
Don't
Seek
Help
By Julian Calderon
Men’s mental health, or even men caring about their mental
health, is shown as weak, but it shouldn’t. It should be considered a
great thing to know for people who want to help and focus on men’s
mental health. But when men do that, many of us, if not all of us, are
taught in so many ways not to seek to help. Which these are the reasons why it’s hard for men to seek treatment.
Physically mental health can mess up our sleep schedule. It can change how we do our
senses, and it can change our eating habits. It can make us loose the motivation to work
out. It can also physically change traits of our body, like heartaches, hair color changes, paler skins, etc. Mentally, it can change our mood in the environment. It can change our way of thinking. It can change our beliefs/trusts, and it can change our memories. It can also impact how we view time. So here are some of the things that make men’s have a troubled time talking about men’s mental health:
In a lot of movies, tv shows, books, and plays, there are characters shown to drink or
use drugs HEAVILY as a way to deal with their mental health. This should be
considered a bad thing, since so many of us know that the more use depend on
drugs and alcohol, the more we have an addiction. These addictions are
destructive because it doesn’t fix any problem but cloud the issues. The issues
are still there, no matter how much you drink and do drugs to forget it.
Another reason why men have it harder to seek treatment is
because the men we are close with are also told to ignore
their mental health. Many of us are raised that showing
vulnerability is, especially if we show it to females. So
when a female asks us what’s going on. We are
taught to ignore how we are feeling, and to
say it’s nothing. Even though, it is straight-
foward to see that we are hurting.
The way we are raised to be in pain to
deal with our mental health is another
reason men have to seek treatment. We would
go work out as a way to deal with the mental
health. Don’t get me wrong, though working out is not
harmful to do when you feel down. But what I am talking
about is self pain, like self-hitting, self-pinching, or punching
things. All these hitting are ways to take out our anger, but the
aftermath is not good. Many of us will become used to the pain of
causing self-pain, so we would do something drastic like committing suicide.
One of the problems that we have a hard time seeking help is that many of us don’t
know our negative emotions or what caused the negative emotions. We know the basics
like anger, sadness, and tiredness. But there are so many other emotions that we use that
we don’t know. Like emptiness, frustration, inadequacy, helplessness, fear, guilt, loneliness,
depression, overwhelmed resentment, failure, sadness, or jealousy. So when we are shown and told
what these new emotions are, many of us are in disbelief, and we would get upset for people who are
trying to help us because we don’t want to show people that we have them.
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