New Year, New Project
Introducing Men Minds
I’m so excited that this project is about to launch, it feels like it’s been a long time in the making! Although it’s been a quick 12 months since the depths of last winter, when we were putting the finishing touches on our bid to UKRI, it’s a project that has been forming in my mind for many years.
I’ve long been interested in the role of young masculinities, not least because my research with young people in conflict with the law has consistently shown me that boys and young men are hugely overrepresented in our justice system and continue to fare poorly on a number of social, educational and health and wellbeing outcomes. This always seems so starkly represented in the suicide statistics. When I was working on a literature review about the vulnerability of young men more than a decade ago now, I was struck by this 1990 quote from Angst and Ernst that “women seek help – men die” based upon their observations that three-quarters of individuals seeking help from a Swiss suicide prevention clinic were women, and three-quarters of those who died by suicide in the same time period were men. Now that quote is obviously an over-simplification, and it is also more than 30 years old, and much has changed in society since then. However, what is still concerning is that of all suicides among young people in the UK between 2014-2016, 71% were male (Rodway et al., 2020). And we know that since then the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing impact of austerity and the cost of living crisis, has had a deleterious effect on young people’s social, educational and employment opportunities as well as their mental and physical health. There’s certainly lots to deal with if you are a young person today, even more so if you are a young man from a group that is more likely to be marginalised in society.
But there’s also a lot more to mental health than suicide or the prevention of mental illness. I’m also interested in how developing masculine identities shape young men’s experiences of mental health and wellbeing, in positive and other ways. I’m interested in this from a research perspective but also, as the parent of a 7 year-old boy, I have a vested interest in understanding how I can help him develop a positive masculine (or other) identity, and how he can support himself and his friends to lead a meaningful and happy life. I see so many things that have changed for the better for his generation, he’s very privileged to see such beautiful, yet ordinary, diversity among his friendship groups and ours. Yet I’m also aware that the playground is often quite clearly divided along traditional gender lines, and I know that at school and elsewhere there are still so many influences about what boys should be and do that he will need to learn to navigate, even before he reaches the age of social media.
And so I hope that this project will bring those strands and experiences together. We’ve got a fantastic team of academics working on the project, and I’m really looking forward to working together with the 12 young men that we recruit, to design more relevant and accessible research tools and methods for researching mental health. I’m even more excited to support those young men to then take these tools forward to conduct their own research with their peers, so that we can better understand what it means to be a young man today, and how that supports or hinders mental health, wellbeing and recovery.
There’s something about the start of New Year, and a new project, that is making me feel hopeful and reflective. I feel that there is going to be so much to learn from this project, from the young men and from my project partners. My New Year’s resolution (among the many ‘carried over’ ones such as going to the gym more, eating less crisps, and indulging in less procrastination on social media 😬) is definitely to make the most of this important opportunity we have been given.