How football has a chance to save the male

You probably know what I am going to write about this week. You probably know because it’s a topic I now return to most weeks. Every Friday morning I wake up, open the papers, and wonder if I can summon the enthusiasm to write about Donald Trump ( give me strength), the general election (snore), or the fact that Emmanuel Macron got married to his teacher (hey, it’s France, c’est la vie!). Then I’m told something about a 13-year-old boy with a debilitating form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that has left him unable to go to school or leave the house, who, when he does summon up the courage to go to a doctor and talk about the fact he can’t look at his mother because if he does he thinks something terrible might happen, is told that he will have to wait six months for treatment.

Or I go to a book festival to talk about depression, as I did last Saturday, and at the end, when the discussion is thrown open to the floor, a boy who can be no more than 18 or 19 stands up and announces, trembling, that people might know him from the local coffee shop where he works, but they might not have seen him recently because he’s been in hospital after attempting suicide.

And he asks if he can read out a poem he has written about his experience, and somehow he gets up on stage and – shaking – manages to get out the words about the terror and pain and misery and invisibility of mental illness, and in the process he takes away that invisibility, he makes it real, and the whole audience stands up to applaud him while I sit there brushing away these half-happy, half-sad tears that I experience with increasing regularity because every day someone tells me a story similar to this, and every day this makes my heart hurt a little while also slightly, oddly, cheering me.

It cheers me because if I have learnt anything over the last few months then it is that every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining is that we are finally talking about this lying abuser that has been destroying lives since year dot and getting away with it because, like all lying abusers, it brainwashes its victims into believing that they are somehow to blame. The genie is out of the bottle. It is not going to go back in.

So apologies, but I’m not going to give you my take on Brexit, or the local elections. I’m going to bang on and on about mental health and if you happen n to find the subject boring – well, l, lucky, lucky you. There are thousands ousands upon thousands of Britons ons who would literally give a right ght arm to find the subject of mentalntal health boring, and you probably know a few of them. You might be related to them. You might even be one of them.

Specifically, as we approach proach Mental Health Awareness ss Week next week, I want t to talk about male mental health. I’m a rabid feminist who o would burn my bra for equality if I didn’t really, , really need it to prevent chronic back ache. But iff

I am all for equality, if I argue for equal pay and employment rights, then ni I need to point out that we really, really need to help blokes when it comes to talking about their mental health. In the week that premiership footballer Aaron Lennon (below) was sectioned, and it was announced that the number of boys being treated for eating disorders had risen by more than a third in a year (double the rate of rise in female patients), we must do something to address the fact that there is a huge crisis in the way men deal with their mental health. We need to save the male.

That is not to say that we should ignore all women who suffer from mental illness. Actually, we should learn from them. It is thought that in England females are almost three times more likely to have mental health issues than men, and yet nearly 75 per cent of suicides are by males. We now know, thanks to the excellent work of organisations such as the Campaign Against LivingL Miserably (Calm),(Calm that if you are a bloke under the age of 45 the thing mostmos likely to kill you is not a gun,g or a car, or cancer. It is yourself.y There is a clear correlationcorr between genderg and the prognosisprogno of a mental illness.illness And deep down,down we all know why that is.

AsA women, we are encouraged to talk about our problems,pro howeverhow big or small. My generation has growngro up with Judy BlumeB and agony aunts in teen magazines.maga That mightmigh not make it any easiere to admit to an eating disorder or an another form of mental illness, but it does make it feel less shameful. The only thing boys are taught to share is their footballs and Action Men. This has to change.

This week, the Australian rugby star Justin Harrison discussed for the first time his own problems with depression. He did it in light of the death of his friend and fellow Wallaby Dan Vickerman, who took his own life in February. As a result of that he has teamed up with other players to host an all-star game at Allianz Park next month that will promote the #lifttheweight campaign aimed at raising mental health awareness within the game.

As my sports desk colleagues reported this week, football clubs have been accused of failing to do enough to look after their players’ mental wellbeing. The head of player welfare at the Professional Football Association said that many were not meeting their duty of care. It might seem trivial, the idea of helping out a load of men paid more in a week than many of us are in a year, but mental illness – unlike so many of us – does not discriminate. If the FA were to launch a campaign similar to that launched by Harrison and his colleagues, they could do much to change the way men deal with mental health. If clubs started to treat broken minds in the same way they did hamstring strains and cartilage tears, then premiership football could, at long last, become a real force for good.