Interesting article - if only 15% of American men talk about their mental health with their "close friends" them and I have a different definition of what a friend is!
Frankly, I don’t even talk about mental health with my wife, and I would say she is my best friend. I imagine this is cultural, but I’m not sure what that means. It’s not like anyone ever said to me, hey, never talk to your friend in private about mental health. And that isn’t something I’d expect people to talk about in public with each other where I could learn from observation. In other words, it doesn’t feel like something that is learned from explicit teaching or from observation. So, where is it learned from?
The only thing I can figure is that as teenagers girls discuss mental health issues and they learned it from slightly older teenage girls who themselves learned it from their own slightly older teenage girls when they were younger.
It actually seems crazy to me that the number is so high for younger age groups:
> And young adults are more likely to say they often talk about their mental health with close friends: 37% say this, compared with 29% of those 30 to 49 and 14% of those 50 and older.
That's a lot of mental health talk. I suspect you won't see this amount of mental health talk in places with good average mental health.