A paradigm shift in the field of men’s mental health: review of the new book ‘Men’s Issues and Men’s Mental Health’, by Prof Robert Whitley

May 3

Book: Men’s Issues and Men’s Mental Health: An Introductory Primer
Author: Rob Whitley
A Review by John Barry

When you are new to a topic in psychology, it’s natural to gravitate towards what appears to be the prevailing view. Although this might steer you in the right direction most of the time, when it comes to the study of men’s mental health, it is advisable to think again.

You might expect a relatively new area of study to be filled with lots of different theories and studies yielding new insights in a spectrum of areas. You might expect research teams across the world to be working in healthy competition with each other to be the first to find something new and impressive that will improve the lives of men and boys the world over. Not so in the case of men’s mental health.

As explained in this excellent book, the study of men’s mental health is dominated by what is called the ‘deficit view’ of masculinity. The result is that almost every aspect of men is viewed through a narrow lens which offers only a very dim and distorted view of men. So where you might expect the full spectrum of psychological theories and perspectives to be applied to understanding men, all we have is a grimly repetitive refrain about the dangers of masculinity.

This situation makes the new book by Robert Whitley, Associate Professor of Psychology at Canada’s McGill University, a breath of fresh air. It not only rejects the deficit view of men, it embraces the science of psychology in a way that genuinely reveals the issues men are facing, and the kinds of solutions most likely to resolve these issues.

The book consists of 10 chapters broken down into: a background to the topic area, five chapters on men’s mental health (suicide, substance abuse, ADHD, depression, and therapy), a chapter each on three of the main issues facing men (education, relationship breakdown, and unemployment), followed by a concluding chapter, which argues the need for a paradigm shift in how men’s mental health is dealt with.

The chapters offer lots of important insights. For example, the chapter on relationship breakdown presents a table listing some of the negative outcomes related to father absence. This list includes: “Sixty-three percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes [and] Eighty-five percent of rapists motivated by displaced anger are from fatherless homes.” The chapter on suicide reminds us that “ethnic minority men within western countries tend to have lower rates of suicide than Whites of European ancestry”. Regarding the widely recognised sex difference in depression: “the prevalence of depression between men and women is similar if the diagnostic criteria are widened to include ‘acting-out’ depressive equivalents” instead of just focusing on the ‘acting in’ symptoms of depression that are seen more in women, such as low mood.

The fact that many of these insights will be new to readers speaks volumes about the ‘male gender blindness’ that hampers our view of men’s mental health. Whitely himself became interested in this field - having begun his career in women’s mental health - because he was so regularly approached by female research participants, widows, mothers, wives, daughters, and other women who raised their deep concerns about men’s mental health.

The concluding chapter of the book is a masterpiece. The chapter opens with the words: “The data marshaled in this book points to one inescapable conclusion: we need a paradigm shift in the field of men’s mental health. We need to move away from tired and cliched notions that men’s mental health woes are caused by factors such as “toxic masculinity” or men’s supposed emotional illiteracy, toward a more holistic interdisciplinary perspective that is based on hard scientific evidence rather than soft unscientific ideologies”.

I fully agree with Rob Whitley, and would highly recommend this book as a key part of that positive forward movement.

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