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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Right. Even here in HN I was arguing with someone who has the hot take that “more conservative leaning men have less mental health issues than liberal and left leaning men and I don’t think we do enough to think about why exactly that might be and what those liberal men could do differently”, and got very angry when I suggested that maybe the reason for that was that conservative men were less likely to seek help or treatment or to even acknowledge, instead of outright deny, any mental health challenges, for fear of anything from seeming weak to being ostracized.

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From experience, my response to this is, por que no los dos?

I am 100% certain that conservative men being less likely to seek help is _part_ of the reason why various data shows them as having fewer mental health issues than their liberal counterparts. But I doubt that's the whole picture, and it's also by far the least interesting part of the picture - the cause and effect there is pretty simple and clear.

As another commenter in this thread observes, there's "too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc". I think that's part of it as well, and it's not difficult to believe that this is something that impacts "liberal and left leaning men" more than conservatives, due to sheer exposure if nothing else. I think you do a disservice to the discussion if you dismiss this outright.

I agree that there is some support that working with your problems create them.

As written in a sibling thread, I am mostly concerned with the relative visibility of issues as that creates equal opportunity.

The implication of not focusing on men's issues is that we can not focus on women's issues either.

Good luck fighting for that.

My controverial opinion is that the "left" has more mental problems because of the therapy and pharmasutical industries.

Conservatives are less likely to see proffessional help but not help. They simply rely on family which imo has a better incentive structure than therapists.

Anecdotally I've watched a lot of people go down the therapy and medication route over the years. I've noticed they become more unstable as time passes. Maybe that would have happened anyways.

Maybe it's because humans weren't designed to spill our guts to strangers and then take prolonged phycoactive drugs to fix mental problems that science does not understand.

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