Why Many Men Don't Ask for Mental Health Help
Former President William J. Clinton said he knew from personal experience how difficult it is for men to seek help for mental health concerns. Why do men, even powerful leaders, have so much difficulty asking for help, especially when it relates to their emotions? As is often the case with issues related to mental health, biological, psychological and social factors are at work. Biologically, men are often attracted to activities that give them an adrenaline rush. Such a rush makes you feel as though you can do or get away with anything. You don’t need anybody’s help. You just need them to stay out of your way.
But what goes up must come down. And when you’re in the midst of an adrenaline crash, you often panic and feel too out of control to ask for help. Your first and foremost thought is of survival.
In addition, men’s left and right brains are not as well connected as are women’s. The corpus callosum connecting the two cerebral hemispheres in men is much thinner than that in women. This causes men to behave under stress as if they have two independently functioning brains: the logical left or the emotional right, which are not in close communication.
This helps explain why many men behave either in a coldly logical manner or in an explosively irrational one (road rage or Super Bowl mania).
As Neanderthal as this may seem, male neuroanatomy is well suited to war and less suited to peace. When a buddy gets shot and killed next to you in the Mecong Delta, you must report back to your commanding officer. It is not the time to fall down on your knees and cry. However, your emotions do eventually catch up, tormenting you hours or years later as shellshock or posttraumatic stress disorder.
A woman may become emotional, but will usually stop short of starting a war or inflicting physical harm. This explains why remarkably few women have perpetrated school or work-related shootings.
From a psychological point of view, reaching out for help is the last thing men, especially those to whom power is important, do. That is partly due to men not viewing reaching out as an option when they’re panicked. But it is also due to their belief that power is measured by how few people you need (the rugged individualist image) and weakness correlates to how many people you need.
Socially, men believe that asking for help lessens other people’s respect for and confidence in them. There is also a territorial paranoia in men who feel that showing neediness encourages potential adversaries to take advantage of their vulnerability. Bare your neck and someone will “go for the jugular.”
In the world of personal relationships, reaching out is viewed not as weakness, but as realness and authenticity. This is demonstrated by not thinking worse of morally wayward teen-agers or husbands and wives who demonstrate contrition, repentance and rehabilitation, but by thinking better of them.
When such children or spouses candidly bare their necks, demonstrate heartfelt remorse, sincerely commit to and successfully correct their character flaws, and then look into the eyes of the people they’ve hurt and ask for forgiveness, they’re more likely to be forgiven and embraced than rejected and shunned.
So what’s a prescription for this male dilemma? The solution for men and women, boss and employee, teacher and student is actually the same. While upset is still fresh, people must talk to each other and express their disappointment and hurt, before these feelings harden into resentment, grow into hostility and explode into immorality or violence.
Mark Goulston, MD, has a wealth of knowledge in personal growth, family relationships and communication skills. He is a respected and popular source for major news outlets for discussion of issues ranging from parenting to workplace violence. He is author of, “Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior,” and is writing a book about restoring love, sex and fun to intimate relationships. He specializes in adolescent, individual, couples and family therapy.
Dr. Goulston currently serves as an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his medical degree from Boston University.
By Mark Goulston, MD
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