The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
‘The emphasis on women's parity in the labour force and society, as well as a greater acceptance of non-traditional gender identities, has upended expectations.’
"At one point we knew we were supposed to be the provider and protector, and the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ wasn’t a thing," he said. "I think men are really trying to figure out what it means to be a man in today’s world."
It just shows how much of a crap they give about men’s mental health that this viewpoint is constantly regurgitated instead of addressing the real problems.
The jobs market is horrendous, especially for the young. Everything is super expensive too. Young men generally desire independence, so finding a job to excel at, buying a house, starting a life… these are what is desired and also what is now out of reach.
Dating and marriage have been completed destroyed by modern society. Blaming goons like Andrew Tate avoids addressing the real issues.
I have family members who work in mental health, and they say that young women are having a worse time than young men.
Women, on average, have higher recorded rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior and attempts. Men, on average, use methods that are more immediately lethal, so there is less opportunity for rescue or medical treatment.
What pisses me off is the subtext of these articles that basically says ‘men can’t handle women succeeding in the workplace’. Mocking pain and suffering and suicide for cheap feminist ‘wins’ is par the course for these people. Yet, where are the articles addressing the decline in mental health of young women and how the loss of their traditional roles as wives and mothers has led them there?
What does democracy have to do with the economy? Well concentration of power in a subgroup is generally pretty bad for overall performance. That's true whether it's concentrated by gender, age (gerontocracy), race, monopolies etc. Even one sector of the economy getting too strong is generally bad (resource curse). There are exceptions of course, but that's the trend.
Since the end of WW2, and especially since the end of the Cold War, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
Young men swung hard for "grab them by the pussy" Trump. I recommend not doing that. If you care about jobs, you need to start caring a lot about DEI and abortion and welfare and trans people. It's not "political bullshit" vs "real issues". The two are inextricably linked, and that jobs chart will keep happening until American society finally understands it. There's a reason Blue states are (generally) richer than Red (ex-slave) states: they have better teamwork.
Women can be mothers and wives. Generally, they do not want the related loss of status back to previous periods. It is men who fret about returning there. The "provider protector" thing is euphemism for "the ruler". And "the protector" thing is fairly absurd since the actual danger the woman need the protection from are men feeling entitled to harm her is she is alone about.
An individual guy protecting a woman from other guys is a protector. But his protector role works only because men as a group are the threat to her and he is being the exception.
[citation needed]
Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.
But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.
BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.
After all, that is what people (including men) want when they vote for republicans. They just dont expect themselves to be receiving it.
This is the paradox of it all, disenfranchised people voting against their own best interests, all the time. This is populism, this is 2026. yay.
For who? Who are they supposed to vote for? You have politicians actively and openly seeking "the black vote" or "the hispanic vote", and all of them pander to women voters nowadays.
Where is the politician chasing the young White men voters? Such a politician would be roundly condemned if they dared to do so. It would be political suicide.
They tried it with Trump in 2016 and now they hate him because it turned out to be more of the same Israel-first, pro-war, screw the common White guy, line-must-go-up multicultural boomer Republicanism.
Vote for who?
You might as well tell me that if I don't like driving to work that I should just build my own subway system to get there.
Perhaps young White men are right to be sick of being everyone's punching bag.
Ronald Reagan and the GOP are the ones responsible for popularizing the "welfare queen" stereotype and specifically associating it with black women. It has been a part of the playbook for quite some time.
Even as an adult, I feel it a bit. You see somebody on YouTube and think the hobby looks intriguing, but feel discouraged because you'll never be as good as someone who made a "make it or break it" bet on the hobby at 12 years old with a parent who was famous in the field.
It seems hard to feel proud of yourself these days in a world where everything you do is judged on a national or global scale instead of your city or county.
Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists. You can blacksmith, poorly, even though someone's making some stunning damascus on YouTube - in fact, it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.
From a random HN comment not so long ago, I highly recommend this gentle intro to applied Adlerian psychology:
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
Not challenging as far as reading goes, but it might hit some people deep enough to only chew on a few pages at a time.
I think it is different because that guitarist on the band that released a CD is a famous musician, at least famous enough to get a contract and release a CD. So I, as a hobbyist, don't expect to be as good.
But now there are thousands of regular people non-professional musicians on youtube (or wherever) who are a hundred times better than me, so it can become discouraging.
When younger I liked to play amateur (very, very amateur) basketball, but Michael Jordan never showed up at our court.
OTOH I did have that experience once, in kart racing, where a top-level professional, a then-current Indy car driver showed up at our local track! It was a humbling experience, but very educational. I'm a good car (and kart) racer at an amateur level, but this pro guy was so many orders of magnitude better than any of us at the club. It was also eye-opening to consider that this pro was only a mid-pack racer in Indycars, the top guys were much faster than him.
I wouldn’t even say I can play guitar and I can do an okay rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
It’s easier to get into hobbies, but you’ll also be far more keenly aware of just how shit you are at it. I do hydroponics and YouTube won’t even really show that; apparently if you haven’t upgraded to aquaponics (hydro with fish to poop out nutrients) it’s not even worth having a channel. The algo hasn’t even suggested someone with a normal sized setup. The smallest I ever see verges on a commercial setup. Genuinely I think the smallest setup I’ve seen had a 500 gallon tilapia tank for a reservoir. The larger ones were installing hydroponic power on rivers to run all their pumps and fans for a detached hydroponic grow system.
The reality is that for most people (and all of human history, excluding a handful of kings, popes, and explorers) you are just undifferentiated worker #7354, undifferentiated office employee #436, or undifferentiated serf #324.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft- hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.My point here is that I get these ads and I can sense that they are targeting young men.
And for young women it's predatory OnlyFans "agents" encouraging them to be virtual sex workers.
There's probably research about where the money went when lockdown meant no going out and no consuming, while the government gave taxpayers some thousands of dollars of emergency funding...
> Curious why dating is a non-starter
- Loss of independence with many young folks not being able to afford to move out. Yes, many cultures have dealt with this, but US culture needs to adjust dating with living at home with parents.
- Loss of capital if they cannot find well-paying jobs to support that independence
- Loss of third spaces (e.g. malls used to be a big one when I was growing up)
- High price of meeting f2f -- fuel, cars, etc. are all very expensive compared to when I was growing up
I dunno, these are things that I can think of. I think social media and dating apps have also really changed the male-female dynamics, allowing both sides to be more selective too early in the dating loop, effectively decreasing odds of actually landing a date by over-filtering.
When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?
I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.
They spend the first 17-18 years of their lives in a public education that is largely gynocentric. It caters to better outcomes for women and has become a zero sum game engineered by women and for girls.
If there was an issue of black folks having poorer and poorer outcomes, and those largely overseeing their education openly joked, “would you rather be in the woods with a bear, or a black person”, the issue would be instantly recognizable and suddenly problematic. It would be immediately understood that bigotry was disenfranchising that segment of the student body and those in charge carried a significant share of the blame. But that conversation isn’t happening.
Instead we get more messaging on how it’s these toxic boys with their toxic masculinity that is driving the issue. That patriarchy has tainted these defective boys and that is the root of their problems. That without addressing their toxicity and broken social conditioning they can’t be fixed. What about those with the toxic messaging? The hate directed towards minors by bitter adults with an axe to grind?
So, seeing the writing on the walls, they retreat to spaces that are unapologetically pro boy, pro male. These spaces don’t exist in public spheres because pro male spaces that exclude women are discouraged. They don’t even have Boy Scouts anymore as a space for just them. It’s not inclusive enough.
To the Internet they go. Chat rooms, message boards, YouTube, TikTok, where there are no real adults in the room but there are opportunists. People like Andrew Tate who are only too happy to welcome them with open arms and tell them they’re awesome. They have power. They can have the future they want. If only they had places to go with reasonable adults in charge, proper male role models who could help them better understand themselves and the world they live in, but that space doesn’t exist. It’s not given space to exist.
The lack of introspection is troubling and this problem isn’t likely to get better without it. So, those in charge will just double down and then double down again instead of looking in the mirror. Adults blaming children for the outcomes they helped engineer in the first place.
If there is any correlation between the wider perception of the state of the world and the instance of mental health issues then the only meaningful claim you could be making about any subgroup is the deviation from that correlation.
Talking about single instances and absolute numbers disregards those nuances.
Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."
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We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.
Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.
Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.
I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.
OTOH institutions were actually strong, and wealth-inequality not-that-bad prior to the 1980's.... Personally, I think SCOTUS and Citizens United are the root cause of recent decline. Money-in-politics has made inept, corrupt gerontocracy unassailable and safe in their unaccountable malfeasance. A revolution is needed, how sad a fentanyl- and social-media-addled American public picked an even more corrupt old man to fix a corrupt old man problem.
I agree.
Include ranked choice or quadratic voting + repeal CU and a lot of things could improve quickly.
Terms limited to 25 years and age 65 at time of election.
Legislators are (with rare few exceptions) not independent from the power of their party (meaning, they either align with party line or don't stand a chance of being elected). And each party has a nearly endless supply of new corrupt people to substitute in. Even if we had single term term-limits for every role, each party will keep cycling in new corrupt party-aligned people into those roles.
What we really need is a system where legislator are in a position that it is not feasible to corrupt them. It's fun to think of ways of designing such a government, but of course it will never be allowed by the powers that be.
I do agree with ranked choice.
Double negative makes this hard to read
That's the clearest version. Just drop the negatives.
The sentence may be valid but it has poor readability. That was my point.
It's !believes(!isSerious(mentalHealth)) which is both poor code and writing.
'I think mental health is a serious concern' would be preferred.
It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.
Job market being automated, poor economy, expensive houses, and a culture that encourages casual dating, onlyFans, porn etc, I just don't know how young men can't be more depressed than the generations before it.
So I'm not sure why you can't buy it when so many factors would more likely point to the result in the two data points shared and the sentiment of the young men expressed.
Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."
I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.
> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine
You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?
As to why young men feel like they cannot find a mate well... There's an entire generation that's been hammered the notion that all men are oppressors and that masculinity is the root of all evil.
You complain that it was talked about openly. But Epstein, Hegseth, Trump, Cavanaugh and all the 45+ republicans known as domestic abusers or likely rapist show he is not a new thing.
Probably the most common trait among confused young men is the lack of a solid example growing up. Most of the boys were either abandoned by their father as a young boy or never saw him while he was in prison. The results are devastating.
Even subtexually,
Seems an inevitable
Underbussing on this
Site.