‘JUST TALK’? I WISH IT WERE THAT SIMPLE
It’s the ‘eat less and move more’ of mental health advice – well intentioned but wildly over-simplistic, argues Andrew Tracey
Alunchtime conversation with colleagues recently turned to the subject of men’s mental health. It’s a subject I spend an inordinate amount of time pondering over, but these weren’t people I knew well; I planned to finish my lunch politely but quietly. Then one of the guys in the group made an ungenerous remark about the ‘type’ of men who ‘don’t help themselves’. They won’t even discuss mental health, he said.
Working-class men without a university education were clearly his mark, as evidenced by his crude impression, delivered with more than a hint of condescension. I took the bait. I pointed out, softly, that not all men have a network of people they feel safe confiding in, and for many men, talking about the problems they face could be destabilising to those closest to them.
Finances, for example, are often a cause of uncertainty, I said, and many men feel the pressure to project a degree of confidence in this area. ‘Then you talk to your mates,’ he said. ‘It’s not difficult.’ I asked him if he’d ever worked on a building site. Then I dropped it. It’s this implied, universal ‘easiness’ of opening up that I, and I know others, struggle to get to grips with.
We’ve come a long way in changing the language we use around mental health, or at least around anxiety and depression. But so much of the current conversation assumes not only a shared vocabulary but a shared infrastructure of people who are on the same page. It’s easy to ‘just talk’ when you’re surrounded by other people who are exposed to the same messaging as you. But just because you’re not personally involved with people who’d laugh you out the room for asking to take a ‘mental health day’, it doesn’t mean those people don’t exist.
That’s not to say that talking about our feelings isn’t a good idea. It emphatically is. The solutions to so many problems are found in their articulation. If you have a network of trusted listeners, absolutely use them.
But take a moment to imagine the frustration levied on those who feel unable to help themselves when the rest of the world is making it out to be so very easy.
Reaching out doesn’t have to be a candid discussion about your internal state. Sometimes it can be enough to simply spend some time with another person, regardless of the conversation. I don’t think my brothers – the two men I love most fiercely on this planet – could actually pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, I feel down, I need help.’ But I hope that they know they could make any superficial excuse to spend time with me; and eventually, as barriers soften, these conversations often happen anyway, at their own pace.
I think it’s important that we occasionally stop to check that, in these high-brow, progressive, well-meaning conversations we’re having, we’re not leaving anyone behind. That we take some time to consider whether the ‘just’, we so casually throw into ‘just talk’
is actually a universal truth.