April 18, 2025 • 55 mins
If you're a bloke, or have a bloke (young or old) in your life - this is a conversation not to be missed.
Once you've listened to it, share it far and wide, as Dr. Zac Seidler, a clinical psychologist and Director of Research at Movember, has the most comprehensive view I've ever come across on what positive masculinity and good men's mental health looks like.
The conversation focuses on not just the psychological aspects of men's mental health, but the societal framework that shapes masculinity. The discussion traverses through topics of men's mental health awareness, therapeutic approaches, toxic and positive masculinity, and how we can foster healthier male communities.
What You'll Learn:
Deciphering Masculinity: We delve into how the traditional concepts of masculinity can be both harmful and beneficial and discuss the need to redefine masculinity in more positive, flexible terms.
Therapeutic Approaches: Explore why traditional therapy might not resonate with men and how 'gender-sensitive' therapy can be a more effective approach.
Social Connection: The vital role of social networks in men's mental health and how a lack of these connections can lead to severe psychological issues, including suicide.
Preventative Measures: Understand the importance of getting ahead of mental health issues through early interventions and community-based programs.
Breaking Down Stigmas: Discuss the societal changes needed to address mental health proactively instead of reactively, and the importance of redefining spaces for men to safely express themselves.
Key Takeaways:
- Masculinity Redefined: Emphasising the value of attributes like stoicism, altruism, and service when appropriately contextualised.
- Supportive Networks: Highlighting the significance of building and maintaining strong social connections throughout life.
- Therapy Reimagined: Utilising flexible therapeutic practices that consider men's socialisation and comfort levels.
- Community and Connection: Promoting the idea that safe, non-judgmental spaces are crucial for men's mental health.
- Early Intervention: The critical role of incorporating mental health teachings and practices from a young age to build resilience.
Resources:
- Engage with Movember's initiatives focusing on men's mental health.
- Explore gender-sensitive therapy training programs like "Men in Mind" to better understand how to engage men in therapeutic settings.
- Connect with organisations like "The Man Cave" and "Top Blokes" that offer programs to support young men.
Support and Share:
Listening to this podcast could inspire not just awareness but also actionable steps towards building better support systems for the men in our lives. This conversation sheds light on the core issues impacting men's mental health and explores innovative solutions designed to uplift and support men in maintaining mental health wellness.
To continue this important dialogue on men's mental health, visit Movember's website and explore their extensive resources aimed at creating change and advocating for better health. If this episode resonated with you or you believe it could help someone else, please share this talk to broaden the conversation about men's health and masculinity in today's society.
00:17 What is Movember?
00:58 The Origins of Movember
02:29 Movember's Global Impact
04:08 Personal Journey into Men's Health
06:50&
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Doctor Zach Seigler, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Thanks for having me, Paul. Great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Yeah, great to have you on.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
And now you are a clinical psychologist, you're an associate
professor at Melbourne UNI and you're also the global director
of research for November. Now, anybody who's in Australia and
probably New Zealand knows what November is, but people in
the UK and the US may or may not. It's
(00:36):
kind of global now, isn't it so. But to talk
to our listeners about what November is, why it started,
and your involvement.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
In it for sure, Hence the global in my title.
I hope that the you're Irish and UK and US
listeners are onto it. But yeah, I'm very lucky to
work for the Mustache Factory. We're we're in our twenty
first year actually as a mental health organization, which is
pretty wild. Yeah. So begun in around two thousand and three,
(01:06):
a couple guys in a pub hanging out, going where
did mustaches go? What's going on there? They'd been working
as admin and creatives doing a lot of breast cancer
campaigns in that era, which was very, very big in
Australia at the time, and really they started to go,
(01:29):
who's talking about our health? Our wellbeing? Some of their
mates had suffered with mental health issues, their dads had
had prostate cancer, and so they started in earnest with
a couple. There was probably twenty of them. The month
of November, they said, all right, who can grow the
shittiest mustache year, Let's see how we go, and they
(01:49):
brought them back. This was before you know, hipsters. Every
man and his dog was growing the mustache for fun
and I just looked like Bora when I grow one.
But the the way in which it kind of moved
really organically was it started out, you know, with a
couple of guys raising some money. They tried to share
(02:11):
it with a couple of prostate cancer organizations who are like,
who are you fuck off? This isn't happening. And then
they came back the year after and they doubled the
amount that they'd raised, and suddenly everyone started to you know,
there iss started to prop up, and we went from
strength to strength to the point where over the past
you know, twenty one years or so, we have raised
(02:33):
over a billion dollars. As a ment Health were the
largest men's health organization in the world. We operated in
over twenty countries. We've got around four hundred staff. We've
got offices in London, in la in Toronto, in Melbourne,
and we, you know, have now moved beyond purely the
(02:57):
practical joke of growing mustaches to to really changing the
face of men's health. We are fundamentally investing in thousands
of programs in uh, you know, disadvantaged communities, in mental health,
in prostate cancer, in men's health more broadly, just trying
to actually galvanize the field and put money into research
(03:20):
and programs.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
That is incredible, And I feel rather embarrassed because I'm
clearly not up on.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
High but that's the point. I'm here to just blow
people's minds. That's the fun of it. We're sneaky. This
is sneaky grassroots stuff, Paul. We don't want to put
it in everyone's face, you know. It's it's so important
that this is by the people for the people. It's
not about being showy, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Yeah, because I'd spoken to the November guys pre covid
by actually coming into doing a talk for the stuff,
and it never actually happened, and I knew then that
they were growing but Jesus had no idea. Just high
much legs that it's actually got and you know that
massive expansion around the globe that is bloody awesome.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, So tell me what drew you as a psychologist
to start to focus on man's health.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
So yeah, I did obviously end up post PhD in
Masters at November, and I can talk about that journey.
But the reason I kind of got into mental health
I was I was really really focused on masculinity as
a you know, pretty much in like high school. I
was really interested in it. I've got two older brothers,
We've got a pretty competitive household, and I was like
(04:35):
a drama and music nerd, and I also played soccer,
and so I constantly was like shifting between hanging out
with the girls and hanging out with the guys. And
I felt.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Myself just just a quick one.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's I'm just trying to read my audience here.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Mate.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I would normally say football, I say footy, and then
people like, you've never played a life, what are you
talking about?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So I chamelelyoned my way through high school, really just
trying to you know, fit in belong, you know, have
mates and not be bullied is pretty much how most
most guys you know moved through the world. Don't don't
hit me. And as a result, I think I just
I started to learn to like be able to read
(05:22):
situations and read how people were responding in certain situations.
I got really really invested in understanding how people respond,
what their stories are, what drives them, what their fears are.
I was a pretty weird kid, I guess, and being
a third child, I think that that kind of happens.
You just you pay attention to dynamics in strange ways
(05:44):
and and try to peace make and all of that
type of stuff. And so moving through my dad was
a medical practitioner. I had a lot of interaction with
at risk populations. He worked in Sydney's King's Cross. There
was a lot of you know, heroin addicts and homeless people.
And I would go in, you know, once a week
(06:04):
and work with him as a teenager and just be
thrown in the deep end. And so I just had
a lot of interaction with a lot of different people
and a lot of different stories, and so psychology kind of,
you know, I was really drawn to it as a profession.
But as I started in my undergrad. I was one
of you know, a canful of guys in that degree,
(06:28):
and there were like two thousand people there and just
lots of girls, and most of the guys who were
there were just there to pick up, like that's kind
of how it went. So I was like, I can
actually if I stick at this, I think something's going
to happen here. And so I put in the time
and I loved it, and I just I stuck with it.
You know, I was at UNI for like nine years,
(06:49):
and throughout that journey, I just realized that no one
was talking about man, no one was talking about masculinity.
I was, you know, the only guy pretty much in
my master's call where I was seeing clients, and I
just kept seeing these guys come in and drop out.
I kept seeing them be misdiagnosed. I kept seeing this
glossing over of men's diverse, nuanced, intricate, beautiful lives, and
(07:15):
so I just went, this is this is a bit broken.
And so my PhD just started to really open up
that door and be like, why aren't guys seeking help?
What does this look like? And eventually it became pretty
clear that lots of men are seeking help heaps of
guys are going to therapy, but they're just not talking
about it or they're not getting what they actually want.
(07:35):
And so I spent quite a bit of time actually
then pivoting towards what happens on the other side of
the door, you know, what is taking place in therapy
that is not hitting the mark. And that's how I
kind of ended up in November. I sat down and
had a discussion with the executive director there where I
was like, you keep, you know, creating a movement that
(07:55):
is getting guys to open up, to be more vulnerable,
to have these conversations, but you're not checking what happens
on the other side. You're not making sure that when
they are vulnerable, what they are open, that someone is
ready to listen. Because inherently there's just this belief that
the system will work and that's just not the truth.
(08:17):
Like many many times men slip through the cracks, women
do as well. And so I pretty much you sold
to him. We need to make sure that clinicians are ready,
that the system is ready, and we need to actually
adapt to men's needs. And so that's what November, you know,
embraced me, and I became part of the team like
six years ago, and from strength to strength, I've been
(08:38):
able to take over our research team which is now
in a number of different countries and looks at not
only systems, it looks at masculinities, it looks at social media,
It looks at all of these different things that are
going on in men's lives and goes, how can we
talk to them about what's happening and how can we
actually offer them something that they want, not what you
(09:00):
think that they need.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Mm hm, that's really interesting. There's there's a couple of
things I want to jump into there. I want to
talk about the whole masculinity piece. And you know that
word is almost becoming synonymous with toxic today, and especially
because I got a fourteen year old boy, it's like,
(09:23):
you know, what do we tell these guys about?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Because I'm hearing.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
A lot of I'm having an oscar coming home from school.
You know there is in school, there's respectful relationships, which
you're probably aware of. For our listeners, this is a
program throughout schools and it just seems to be at
least through through what we're hearing from him, it's this
is how men are bad.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
This is what not to do.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
This is how not to behave and nothing around talking
about values and virtues and how you should behave and
what good masculinity actually looks like.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
And and it's it's driving lots of men away. You'll
be aware of that's more than me.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
And they're going into the monosphere and listening to wankers
like Andrew Tiitt and stuff like that. Right, So, so
what what can we do, particularly with those emerging young
men who are going through their teens, they're trying to
find out they're clace in the world, and they're just
getting bombarded with all this negativity on one side and
(10:27):
all these deckheads on the other side saying, hey, come
in here, I'll show you something.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
So wanker is like, Andrew, that's a great quote. We're
gonna we'll take that one out. But I think that
something that is so important is, as you said, they
are trying to work out who they are. They're going
through and we all remember that that that identity molding,
that extreme discomfort of like trying to work out who
(10:56):
I am and where I belong. You need not only role,
you need messaging, you need structuring and scaffolding. You need
a process that provides you with growth opportunities and provides
you with a sense of aspiration and future orientation. And
the messaging at the moment is devoid of that. It
(11:18):
is filled with this mentality of what not to do,
what not to be, and it's a deficit focused view,
which for all intents and purposes, despite the fact that
there is a lot of harm that goes on, we
cannot excuse the fact that, you know, men and boys
are doing some bad shit across the globe, but we
(11:39):
need to find a way to lean into the good,
to exemplify the good, to talk about the fact that
there are silent heroes all over the place. You know,
this idea that there are incredible role models in dads
and teachers and grandfathers who are never on the front pages.
It's just the dickheads who are on the front pages
of the paper who take up all of our time.
(12:01):
And that's where toxicity comes from. So I have a
fundamental issue with that term. As you would expect, it's
very harmful. It's not useful. It does not provide any
structure for young men to adapt their behavior. All it
does is says, here is a blanket ban on this thing.
(12:21):
That you have inherited and you now have no ability
to change that at all. Like if it's said there
are toxic elements to the way in which masculinity is
socialized and you should try and consider this, that's a
different ballgame. But the media will never purport that the
narrative is just like this is broken, You're all fucked.
(12:43):
That's kind of how it looks at the moment. And
that type of problem orientation without any solutions is exhausting,
it's degrading to young men, and fundamentally, my main concern
with the topic is that it does not make anything
better if we are afraid of violence against women. Calling
(13:04):
men toxic will not fix that. That's my issue, and
so I'm really focused on building up young men and
showing them what is possible, in providing them with a
manifesto of health and well being, rather than letting them
be driven into the arms of these guys who have
(13:25):
a really clear doctrine of life that is do this,
do this, do this, date this woman, make this money,
buy this car, get this job, And it's all about
power and domination, and it is fueled by men's insecurity
and this feeling that they are constantly pressured to achieve
(13:47):
something when in fact, really what we should be doing
is going, hey, guys, life is very scary, it's tough,
it's uncertain, but here is a path that we can
all work walk together. Mah.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I love that, and we need a lot more of that.
It's one of those things and we see it so much. Right,
is that there's well intentioned programs that then are just
misguided and have lots of an intended consequences. And as
you rightly pointed out, the unintended consequences is pushing.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Man towards all the wanker spear wanker spit.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
But I think the thing is is that they're well intentioned,
and the one way that you can ensure that they
are going to actually hit the mark is by co
creating them with the audience. Sit down with the fourteen
year old boy and go does this pass the sniff test?
And they're going to be like, no, that sucks, that's boring,
that's stupid. Why are you talking to me like that?
(14:50):
I'm out? And then you go, all right, maybe this
won't work.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, And you know what, it's really interesting because my
wife sent an email and to the school that Oscar's
in exactly around that, saying.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Where are the workshops?
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Where are you talking to because Oscar's coming home and going,
you know, they're they're talking about guys thinking this. I've
never thought about that in my life, and it's almost like.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
A self fulfilling prophecis yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
And suggestibility right, and Oscar's going, gee, that's so weird,
and he's coming home, going this shit's weird.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Why don't why don't we assume that these young guys,
and I always say this about the manosphere, which I
think is really important that young guys, and We've got
so much research on this, they don't go in with misogyny,
they leave with it. They leave with it. They don't
go into these classes with misogyny. They sit there, they
hear all of this stuff. Then they end up in
(15:44):
this you know, shitty banter with their friends because they're
now being force fed content that seems at odds with
their values, and they leave with these ideas you know,
that are pretty pretty dark. And so I think that
what we should be doing is going, here is an
offering for us to say to you, we believe that
(16:04):
you have inherent goodness. We believe that this is what's
possible for you. Let's help you get there. Let's provide
you with the path, rather than here is the badness,
and we're going to assume that this is who you are.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah. Yeah, you need to rewrite the curriculum on respectful relationships.
That would be a big step forward. I'm absolutely serious.
I think one of the things I've been thinking about
this a lot, right, particularly with a fourteen year old boy,
is the lack of in the West a ride of passage.
(16:40):
I mean, I think that's pretty huge. Ide interview that
doctor his name escapes me just because my head is
full of PhD and book at a minute, but he
actually was a medical doctor. He saw a lot of
problems with boys and went into the whole heap of
research and so all round the world and many many
traditions a ride of passage for teenage boys to bring
(17:01):
them into to manhood. And and he's saying, you know,
that is missing in our lives in the Western world,
and and actually has started this movement on ride passage,
which is I think brilliant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Have you any.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Experience is that? Anna Rubs? Anna Rubins, Yeah, I apologize,
we got there.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
It was a brilliant podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, so no, I know, I know Ana's worked really
well and I think it's important. You know, I don't
know if you've heard of the Man Cave, which is
an organization that goes into schools and does you know
young men's programming. We fund them at November. We consider
ourselves like the big brother of the men's sector. There's
(17:42):
also Top Blokes, and there's tomorrow Man, and there's you know,
the Positive Masculinity movement. There's there's a lot of different
school based programs that are trying to do this type
of rights of passage in different ways because some of
them are shorter, some of them are actually camps that
are that are longer. It's it has taken off, and
I think that we should also point out that the
(18:03):
right of passage movement is a beautiful in many ways
indigenous tradition and you know, going back to country, for instance,
is something that you hear about so often. Adam Good
spoke about it when he was going, you know, through
the horrible experiences that he was, you know, copying all
of that racism in the AFL, he went back to
(18:23):
country to try and you know, reconnect and that's something
where you start to access your identity, access who you
want to be and what you want, you know, your
life to look like. We've lost sight of that. And
do I think that we need a really structured societal
process for young men to move between boyhood and masculinity
(18:45):
and manhood. Maybe not. Do I think that there needs
to be a clearer discussion about how that period looks,
who needs to show up, and what success looks like. Yesnally.
And the right of passage as a concept I think
is essential in many ways because you know, women go
(19:07):
through it biologically. You know, they have a literal turning
point where they go to womanhood pretty quickly, and that
happens mind and body for them, and there's a lot
of conversation around it, thankfully now used to be. We
have gone from a point where there probably used to
be far more discussion for young men as they moved
(19:29):
into that in manhood towards this let's not let's not
in a way wake up the beast. Let's not have
that conversation. We don't want to point at that. We're
just going to hope that it works out. And I
think that that pluralistic ignorance in some ways that idea
that if we just shy away from this thing and
(19:51):
don't look at it, it'll just work out has really
fundamentally failed. Rather than going we need to structure this.
We need to make sure the boys have a sense
of belonging, they have a sense of community values, they
have a sense of service and altruism. And when I
talk about masculinity, people always go, you can't define healthy masculinity.
(20:15):
All we can do is define toxic. And I was like,
I can define healthy masculinity. It's focused on leveraging masculine
traits flexibly, which is that things like service, altruism, you know, fatherhood,
generative fatherhood. There are lots of different things that exist.
Stoicism and self reliance in the right dose are extremely useful.
(20:39):
I know you think you know long and hard about
hardiness and grit and toughness. All of this stuff, when
applied effectively in the right time, at the right place,
that is healthy, positive masculinityrit large and we should not
shy away from having those conversations.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah, one hundred percent. Let's not jump over and talk
about therapy.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
So you have done a lot of reading and the
research into the area of gender sensitive therapy, and why
some traditional therapeutic modes.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Might not work as well for men. So just talk
to us about that.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And is there an element because you mentioned right at
the start that in your masters you know you'll be
the only guy. And I remember at university psychology was
the vast majority were females. Has that influenced the way
that therapy is done and therefore is not the best
approach for men? Or is there many other things that
(21:45):
play I'm sure there's quite a few things to play
into it.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, there are so many different things to play. I
think the fact that the vast majority of people who
come to therapy are women is probably more of a
factor than who is offering it. But you know, psychologists,
you know it's about eighty percent are women in the profession.
And I actually don't think that that is anything other
(22:08):
than a marketing failure. Like it's a damn good job,
like you know you've got, especially in this day and
age where everyone is being replaced with AI, I think
I have pretty good future aspirations to exist as a therapist.
I'm not being replaced anytime soon. And you know, you
have stability, you get paid pretty well. There's just this
(22:30):
belief that it's women's work. And I think that that's
a serious issue within our society that that type of
sitting in someone's distress, in someone's life, you know, for
a moment, is not considered to be men's work. I
hope that we're going to see a shift and that
more men are going to get into it. It's not
because women cannot treat men. Let me be really clear.
(22:50):
Women are just as good at offering therapy to men
as men are. It's just that more choice is always better.
You know, you want more gay therapists, more indigenous therapists.
You just want you know, greater Yeah, you know, diversity
so that someone can always see someone who they want to.
I think that that's really important. But when it comes
(23:12):
to the therapeutic model, you know, you'd understand that it is.
It's very much focused on emotional communication and vulnerability, two
things that are like fundamentally at odds with the way
that we're brought up as men. In many ways, also,
it's like, sit down and let's have an hour long
face to face conversation about your deepest, darkest thoughts. Talk
to me about your mother and your sex life, and
(23:34):
every guy is like, damn that that is not where
I want to be right now. And there are some, thankfully,
who are into it, and there are many who are
not socialized to that experience, and it's it's very uncomfortable
and foreign and unaccommodating in many ways for them. And
so what I try to do and what this training
(23:57):
that I've created through November with my team is called
Men in Mind, which is like, how do we actually
get therapists to upskill to realize that when men come
into therapy, they have a lot of beliefs and expectations
and attitudes and biases that are going to stop good
therapy from happening. Also, you as a therapist have a
(24:19):
lot of beliefs and attitudes about men. You might be
reading god knows what, and you've got toxicity running through
your brain and then a guy all tattered up comes
in and you've decided that he's a ship bloke. Yeah,
And the issue is, as we said before, you end
up with a self fulfilling prophecy where he's only going
to show you what you're looking for. And so the
(24:41):
aim is to open this up. That's what the aim
of this training is, which is to be like, let's
actually make masculinity not just some commentary bullshit that we're
reading constantly in our opinion pieces, but rather, let's go
beyond adolescence, the show that everyone wants to talk about,
and actually look at what is at the core here
(25:02):
of this guy's distress, which is often the way he
was brought up, the pressures that he has, the stress
that exists in his everyday life. And when I talk
about the fact that therapy is in many ways a
contradiction with masculinity, it's because many of these guys don't
have mental health issues in the stereotypical sense. What they
(25:25):
do have is situational stresses. They have financial distress and uncertainty.
They have, you know, stress around unemployment, they have financial
relationship difficulties. You know. The number one risk factor for
suicide in this country is not a history of depression.
It's past six months separation.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Really, it's breakup.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Breakup is the greatest risk factor for suicide. So if
anyone has a mate who has just gone through a divorce,
those six months are like crucial for jumping on and
offering support and services for guys. But we don't see that.
We go, oh, he's not depressed, This all happened out
of the blue. It didn't happen out of the blue.
(26:12):
You know, this stuff is so important that we realize
that things look and feel different amongst many guys when
they get depressed. For instance, there's a subgroup of men
who don't go into this like sad, crying, worthlessness whole.
They go into anger, irritability, and drug and alcohol use.
They go into externalizing. They send all of their distress
(26:34):
out onto the world, and it looks like men behaving badly,
it looks like shit behavior. But in many instances it
is a cry for help, and we just need to
get more attuned and sensitive. That's what gender sensitive treatment
is being attuned to the fact that if this guy
was brought up in this way with these parents, in
(26:56):
this world, he is going to respond to his internal
experience in this way.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
It's a really interesting point, and it's actually made me
think about stuff. I actually have three minutes in that
category in in my sort of large social group, and
and and and you know, there's a there's a bunch
of us, you know, making a concerted effort to get
around them.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
But it does this play into.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Just had of thought that that you know, the biggest
risk for suicide is my age group middle aged and
is a chunk of that because of that tends to
be the age where there are separations and divorces and
then men are not dealing with it when big factor.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
So the divorce, the divorces tend to happen. Yeah, at
forty to fifty, like, that's where most divorces take place,
and that's where the suicide rate is that its highest. Yeah,
that's forty four to fifty five year old age bracket.
It's it's for that group. And no one actually gives
a shit about men in the middle years, Like, it's
just not it's not a concern. Everyone is very focused
(28:09):
on young men, as they should be in many ways
because they are the future of our society. But when
you look at base statistics, we need to pivot to
start to focus on these guys because what happens is
that there is a long term suppression of emotion, There
is a long term breakdown in social connectivity. You know,
(28:30):
the number of friends that those guys have drops off
a cliff. Yeah, And so very lucky that you've got
at the vast majority of guys who are in that
age bracket who have kids have very few people to
call on when they're in a time of need, And
so they get to divorce and their whole social scaffolding
(28:52):
is gone. They literally don't have anything to stand on.
No one is there to wrap around them. Their wife
created all of the social events for them.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
That's a massive thing, isn't it is that most of
the social stuff is.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Driven by the wife and their friends.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And then when the divorce happens, vacuum choose and the
guys left on them of.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Course, because it's done. No fucking work do the work?
Like what like why is it that this is women's work?
And this is the thing women don't want to do that.
They don't want to arrange everything. You don't need to
be hopeless at this stuff like it is. And they
say this to guys all the time. This is fundamentally
life saving for you. You can go and have as many
ice baths as you want, but if you don't have
(29:34):
any mates, you're done. Like, it is essential that in
you when you're eighteen, when you're twenty five, when you're thirty,
no matter how important your job is, if you do
not spend time on your social connections, your life expectancy
will drop like that is the thing that keeps guys alive.
You look at the Harvard Longitudinal Study. Consistently, the only
(29:57):
guys who are alive in their nineties, regardless of whether
they smoked, what their diet was, what their exercise was,
the ones who had quality relationships are still alive. That
is essential, and that is why when you get to
your mid forties and you have a separation, you don't
have any friends around to call on when you're in
a time of need. You have extreme shame around all
(30:21):
of this that you have no vocabulary to describe, and
you have stigma around gunotherapy or the therapist doesn't connect
with you. It's a pretty bad situation. So we just
need to do a lot better at not only empathizing
with those guys and providing them with structures, we need
to make sure that they know that there are so
(30:42):
many like them out there and that they can connect
with one another. Because all they want, all of us want,
all the time, is this sense of connection and belonging.
And so when guys go, oh, I don't want to
pick up the phone, and guy seem nady, you know
that's always I don't want to, I don't want to
(31:03):
be vulnerable. I see nadiy blah blah blah. I'm like, mate,
I know that all you want is to hang out
with him, So like, we need to move past that
shame response that I might look weak for asking for
something when in fact your values are telling you I
need this, This is important to me.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Do you know one thing I often talk about in
my talks is the Hanoi Hilton prison camp in Vietnam
where they had something called the tap code. And I
interviewed Lee Ellis, who spent five and a half years
in that prison camp, and the tap code was away
when they were in solitary confinement, they could tap on
(31:45):
the walls and the pipes and communicate with each other.
And the research shows that that is the single biggest
predictor of PTSD and suicide and combat veterans is whether
or not they have social networks that they use.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
I'll tell you something, you know. I gave evidence to
the Royal Commission into Veterans Suicide and everyone was kind
of perplexed about the fact that the suicide rate is
so high in veterans. But I tell you, when it's
so high, it's not when they are active servicemen. It
is when they return. It's always when they return, and
I'll tell you why, because they have a sense of purpose,
(32:22):
meaning and belonging. And then the carpet is ripped out
from underneath them and they go, who am I? And
where is everybody? And that's literally what happens when men
just get into their forties, they go, wait a second,
I was having fun, all my mates are around, and
I actually didn't water the seeds. I did not help
my social life grow because it wasn't a priority. You
(32:45):
need to make it a priority. I sound like I'm
preaching here, but it's something that is so fundamentally simple
and is so disregarded. And I think that this notion
that like masculinity going your own way, being your own man,
is absolute bullshit. We are human beings and the way
in which masculinity flourishes is when we are in tandem
(33:09):
with other people.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You're preaching the correct palm. And actually, my wife so
because I'm ex military, right, I spent eight years in
the British military and they moved over to Australia. I
didn't know anybody.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And just you know, dove into work.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
And building my career and my wife one day said
to me, you need to go back and start playing football.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
And she was, actually, I always know, they always and yeah, exactly,
she she knew, she absolutely knew, and it was definitely
the best thing I'd ever did, right, because it's Deny,
this whole group that are around soccer and even though
we're not playing anymore, we're still hanging out and talking
(33:52):
and supporting each other.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
How much of the just to come back to the
therapy thing, how much of this is that men normally,
You know, if you're going to generalize, lots of females
have fierce to fierce conversations.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
They catch up over coffee and they sit in the
talk fierce to fierce. But with me and a lot.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Of it's shoulder to shoulder right in the pub, watching sport,
chatting and stuff like that. How much of that plays
into therapy because therapy is that fierce to fierce, which
as men are not as accustomed to in general.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Exactly. So there are two things here. The first is
that men are not beyond face to face conversation, So
we should never do this thing where we're like, we
have to completely adapt everything because they can't do it.
It might take longer, and so you build in systems
that are going to get you to that endpoint. But
let's not throw out the baby with the bath wat
(34:50):
and be like, men can't sit down and have our
long conversations because we're right here doing that. Yeah so yeah,
not true. But it does take longer, it is more uncomfortable,
it is more ful in many instances, and it's extremely foreign.
And so for those guys who do more of that
shoulder to shoulder, I think what's really important is that
that doesn't need to go away. That can exist within
(35:13):
the therapeutic setting. And this is what I try and
teach in this program, which is that just because you
decided as a clinician, yeah, or you were taught. Actually
I was always taught, and I was reprimanded if I
did anything different during my Masters that you must sit
in these two chairs. They must look the same. You
must be at this angle, you must ask these questions.
(35:36):
When I'm doing an assessment, I have to you know,
have my clipboard, blah blah blah. Very quickly I was
like fuck this, like this is not happening. I went
to Darwin from one of my placements, and I was
working with young indigenous kids, and it's like, if you
attempt to do any of that with them, you're done. Yeah,
And it's a baptism of fire to really learn that
very early, which was great. But what I do is
(36:00):
is I do what is necessary to get to the
same endpoint, which is to say, I've had ping pong
tables in my therapy room, I've had pool tables. I've
played Call of Duty with young guys, like when their
hands are busy, the ability for them to open up
is profound. And so this is what I mean. The
(36:21):
endpoint of interest is around openness and vulnerability and whatever
way it looks, how you get there. They do not
decide that it has to look like this. And so
I think that our therapy, you know, I've done running therapy,
there's adventure therapy, there's equine therapy. There are so many
different modes that are opening up. They're considered like crazy offshoots,
(36:45):
you know, but really what should be considered crazy is
the fact that we've decided that these four walls, this
is how you're going to talk about your trauma, like
wild And so I threw out the clipboard because I
was like, if I can't look at him or if
if I can't be there with him, he thinks I'm
a robot and my first two sessions or so, I'm
(37:06):
not going through his entire family history chronologically because he
doesn't talk like that normally. I talked to him about
surfing for twenty five minutes and how the waves were
this morning, and then in the last ten minutes he
dumps because he's calm, he's relaxed, he's been able to
be a human being. So just do what works and
ask him what he wants, and if he doesn't know,
(37:29):
co create it with him.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, I mean, I love that.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
I actually know somebody who went to see who was struggling,
really struggling, and went to see a psychiatrist who sat
behind a desk and quite far away from them with
a clipboard, just firing questions Adam and then just give him.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
A something for eleven minutes and asked for five hundred dollars.
But this is the thing, It's like the system is broken.
It's not any one individual who's going to be able
to change this. I can only see however many people
I can. That's why I'm trying to create system change,
because we need our training programs at our universities. We
need our you know, practitioner regulation, stuff like it's not
(38:11):
unethical to do treatment in a way that's going to
be beneficial. But they've created such strict bounds that we've
ended up actually shooting ourselves in the foot.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Yeah. Agree, My wife's going through a master's in counseling,
and it's so bloody rigid some of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
But I think you you become the artist.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
You find your way doing exactly.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Yeah, So let's let's let's come back to this suicide thing.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I remember my dad telling me. So he lives in
Ireland in an area whe there's a lot of farmers.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
And and he said, when Ireland, which is one of
the last countries in Europe to bring in the drink
driving laws with full force, he said, meal suicides in
farmers went through the roof and and and he saw
it in his area because these guys, a lot of
them were single. They work really, really hard, and then
(39:01):
a couple of times a week they'd drive into the
pub and have a few paints with their mates, sending
shoulder to shoulder, and as my dad has described it,
that was their church. And then when they brought in
the drink driving lots. If they had like more in
a paint, that was it. They were, they were done.
They'd lose their whole livelihoods. And he said they just
(39:22):
stopped coming, and suicides massively spiked. So and that comes
back to your early point about that that men need
those social networks, and we all need the social networks, but.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
But we're not as good at them as females.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
What other So you talked about the importance of that
in suicide prevention. What other approaches are promising in the
suicide prevention space for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
So we've been working at this for a long time,
and it's it's really central in some ways because I
you know, my my theasis was really folks is on
depression whenever I did that when I was a wee boy.
And it's funny how when you talk about men's mental
health you get dragged always into the pointy end of suicide.
(40:13):
It always goes there because it seems that that journey
and all of the other distress that kind of sits
in the middle, it's only the crisis that people are
willing to kind of deal with, that's where they want
to focus much of their attention when it comes to prevention.
It is about those early times. It's about getting on
(40:35):
this stuff around social connection, around relationship health, fundamentally, around
making sure that they understand what rejection looks and feels like.
You know, this idea that we can't be in control
and powerful and dominant of our relationships and in fact
it's a push pull always and it will not always
(40:56):
go your way. And learning how to regulate our emotions.
I would say that that is the one thing that
we are really struggling with as men, is our emotion regulation.
Everything kind of comes back to a sense of shame
and failure, I think for many guys, Yeah, which is
that I couldn't do this, I couldn't be this, I
couldn't achieve what I thought was necessary, and there's all
(41:18):
of these wood I should have could at things, and
this ability to go in your own mind. Actually, this
is what's happening right now. This is what I need
to do. This is how I need to calm myself down.
This is how I'm going to talk to myself in
a way that's going to soothe me and help me
move past whatever this feeling is. Instead, what happens is
(41:42):
that that feeling comes up and it is fundamentally intolerable
for many of these guys because they have not been
given the code to be able to actually respond to it.
And so you go from a twelve year old who
is you know, pre suspended for showing emotion in class
rather than sat down and spoken to about what he's
(42:04):
feeling and thinking. And then he's an eighteen year old
and he's drinking and drug taking and a girlfriend's just
broken up with him, and there's just seemingly no way
for him to overcome this feeling because it's just too
much for him. To the thirty year old who's just
had a kid and now he is suddenly in this
new world and he has no ability to understand the
(42:27):
extreme stress that he's feeling about being a protector and
a provider. It goes on and on and on, and
at some point it just becomes too much for some people.
And so what we need to do is get on
it early. But it's also never too late, Like there
are ways I've worked with sixty seventy year old men
who have so much trauma about things that happened to them,
(42:48):
you know, early on. And the thing about the Irish,
which was so lucky to learn from is this poetry,
this storytelling, this ability to make light of pretty dark situation.
And I think us men need to find a way
to realize that is deeply masculine, to make meaning of
what has happened to you, to describe it, to corral
(43:11):
those internal pieces and actually regulate those feelings rather than
try and push them further and further down with more drink.
You know, because like alcohol is a huge thing. It's
extremely social for many guys. It's the thing that gets
them out of the house, but they don't seem to
have any flexibility and like I can do other things
(43:32):
with my mates, you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Yeah, And I think that's where that's where sport, golf, soccer, whatever,
you know, really comes to the forward. But I wanted
to just come back to something you kind of started
talking about this, and I think it's kind of endemic
of our whole health care system is that we have
a set curse system, not a healthcare system. You know,
(43:57):
we weird until people are screwed and then we try
to treat them. And in the medical model, there's a
lot of drugs, as in psychology, a lot of drugs
that that that that you know, have limited effectiveness. So
if you were czar of the universe, right, what what
would you do?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
What sort of things would you implement? And and what
it is?
Speaker 3 (44:19):
And I think we've talked about some of them along
the way, but just just you've got that magic wand
nigh what.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Would where would you start? And where would you go?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I don't want this trumpy and power. But the what
I what I would do, I think is I would
I would totally agree that I would focus heavily on
health and well being. I would focus on like you
don't remember any of the arithmetic that you did at
fucking school, Like none of that holds. You need a
certain amount, you need the building blocks. And then we
(44:49):
need to focus on life skills. We need to focus
on our emotional inner world in a way that is
not feminized, that is not at odds with the way
and we're we're brought up, but is actually directly tied
to our sense of self and so doing values work,
doing rights of passage, doing ideas of you know, spending
(45:10):
a period a month you know at school, going who
do you want to be? Not? What do you want
to be? Not I want to be a five? This
is always a thing that everyone is asking kids, what
do you want to be? It's who do you want
to be? It's it's and how are you going to
get there? And it's not about this aspiration of I
need to be a CEO, I want to be an entrepreneur.
(45:31):
That's what's killing us. It's this idea of achievement rather
than that hard work of self determination and growth, you know.
And so what I would focus on is building up
those course skills around making sure that our communities are
actually interlinked and tightly bound in ways that they used
(45:52):
to be for our grandparents, where people would have neighbors
that they would talk to, God forbid, Like I don't
know where that went, you know, absolutely. You know, we
can talk about tech and social media, like there's a
whole thing going on there which is harming everybody and
is leading to serious brain rot and an inability to
actually be in the present moment. And anxiety is going
(46:12):
through the roof with that as well. Let alone pornography
and all of these other situations which are really harming men. Pornography, gambling, alcohol,
seriously undermining men's ability to show up for themselves and
their families and so and that leads to this spiral,
you know. And so if I am the Cizar, I
(46:34):
am focused really heavily on connection, on understanding your emotional
experience and being able to discuss and describe it, and
making sure there are some schools that you know that
I've worked with where every boy sees a psychologist once
a month. You know, we should have a public school
system where I don't want to see you when you're sick.
(46:54):
I have no interest in that be because when you're depressed,
I need to actually like get you out of bed.
I need to get you going to work. That's not therapy.
Therapy is building you up. It's creating that resilient scaffolding
so that you can continue on when you're down in
the dumps. That's that's not where the work happens. And
(47:17):
so it's really important that we actually see psychology as
dental care preventative. Once every six months, give me a
give me a check up, check my gums. You know.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, I know that that is very powerful. Is there
anything that November are doing in this space?
Speaker 3 (47:36):
Yeah, because because because this is this is the stuff
that I'm really pastiate at about is like how do
you how do you head this off at the past,
and how do you give people a guide a scuffold
as you say, to live the good life? And and
and actually, just before I finished the question, I think
you know I'm not religious. I'm a recovering Catholic from
(47:57):
Northern I don't have been in recovery for forty years.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
But I think part of the overall problem.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Is the breakdown of religion, although I'm not a massive
fan of it, because it gives people a set of
values and a guide from how to for how to live,
but also a community.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
And then you're taken you're taking that away, and people.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Need to then go and do the work, particularly about
what sort of a person do I want to be?
Speaker 1 (48:23):
What sort of values do I have?
Speaker 3 (48:24):
And if you don't have anybody steering them, then often
that is outsourced to social media and these tribes and
social media that that can become really destructive.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
So sorry, but that that that turned into a rantom.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
The moral fabric. When you when you had really clear
institutions that provided community, there were scouts, there's rotary churches,
and they all fell apart because they were all corrupt.
And that this is the issue. How do we create
safe male only spaces as well, you know, how do
we create places that are actually going to not be
(49:06):
abuses of power, that are not going to be corrupt,
and that are actually going because there was a lot
of health that came with that, there was a lot
of benefit. It just so happens that we actually unraveled
all of it rather than some of it, which I
think is problematic. But what my Vember is doing, We've
got programs all over the globe and we fund you know,
(49:28):
some of the school based stuff. We fund a program
and we created it called Ahead of the Game, which
is a sport mental health and resilience training and so
we go in. We're partnering with the AFL on this
at the moment, and we're actually partnering with Gaelic Football
as well in Ireland. And what we do is we
(49:48):
go into a club, into a community club. This is
not elite, it's at the grassroots and you go in
and you give a program on understanding and responding to
your own mental health issues, building up resilience in these
young guys. But something that we do that is so
important is that we also train the coaches and the
parents because you have to have the ecosystem because what happens.
(50:10):
And this is, you know, something that I'm learning a
lot of in the violence prevention space is I do
more of it. When you go and you tell a
boy at thirteen, this is what you need to do
to be a respectful man, and how to you know,
not be misogynistic and violent and whatever. If he goes
home and his dad is beating his mum, none of
that matters. Build an ecosystem of health and well being
(50:35):
and safety for a young kid, and he will feel
like he exists within a place that makes sense. He
exists with rules that he can follow. He exists with
an aspiration that he can achieve because his coach and
his dad is playing the game with him, you know.
So that's you know, one really key program that we're
(50:56):
rolling out across the globe. And I continue to spend
most of my time with my team researching how we
can get this no do gap being a bit shorter,
so knowing and actually implementing, because at the moment, it's
just like Ivory Tower. Let's all sit up here and
churn out PhDs and they don't go anywhere. My team,
(51:18):
who all have PhDs, are fundamentally obsessed with translation, and
I need to make sure that when we find something,
it gets into the hands of guys quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
I love that. That translation and closing the knowing doing gap.
I talk about that all the time and health behavior
change right, because a lot of people know what they
need to do, but they're not. I want to want
to talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences. I
know we've got a limited time here, but I remember
talking to Professor John Reid, who's done a lot of
(51:52):
research in this sorry, and said that psychologists and therapists
and survey said he did only twenty five percent of
them ever ask somebody about whether they had adverse childhood experiences,
and he's like, they are their biggest driver of mental
health issues. What's your thoughts on that and high and
(52:14):
when do we intervene and how is that different from
somebody who hasn't had those adverse childod experiences that are
setting up their view.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Well, when we talk about upstream and downstream, you know,
we've spoken about prevention and how we're going to get
ahead of this stuff. Nothing that we do is going
to be more important than dealing with aces with adverse
childhood experiences. It is the bedrock of mental health issues,
of violence in our society, of basic trauma that is
(52:44):
leading to personality difficulties, that is leading to alcohol and
substance misuse, and we have it rife within our society
and no one is willing to look at it. So
whether it is violence in the home, whether it's sexual
child sexual abuse which is amongst young men, and nobody,
nobody is willing to call this out. It is so
(53:06):
so common and it is having such untold effects across
the lifespan. If we get onto this stuff early, if
we are willing to say we need to focus on
our young people, we need to focus on children fundamentally
and safeguard them from this stuff and build services for
them so that we can actually nip it in the
(53:27):
bud so that they're not the forty year old man
who is now perpetuating violence because he knew nothing else.
He knew nothing else. There are so many ways that
if we get onto this stuff early and we actually
say this matters, This matters to us as a society
to expunge this behavior and to make sure that children
(53:48):
can live safely and happily as they should as children,
and to not stigmatize them when they enter into a
service with stuff like this, because that's what happened. They
come in and they're just too complex, the behavior is
too disordered, et cetera. I really think that that is
(54:10):
at the core of our future success here is going
to be how we actually respond to child maltreatment.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, and it's a big, soorny wiki problem, I think,
as is the whole mental health stuff. But mate, you
and November November are are our trading and awesome bloody path.
So I tip my hat to you, and I tip
my hat to the organization and the massive growth of
the organization because God is this needed. It is just
(54:41):
so needed. So so thanks for everything you do, Thanks
for everything your organization does, and thanks for sharing your
knowledge on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
I could speak about this stuff for days.
Speaker 3 (54:52):
But I know you've got to go.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
But may that was bloody awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
I'll be back. Thanks a lot more.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
The long way
Doctor Zach Seigler, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Thanks for having me, Paul. Great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Yeah, great to have you on.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
And now you are a clinical psychologist, you're an associate
professor at Melbourne UNI and you're also the global director
of research for November. Now, anybody who's in Australia and
probably New Zealand knows what November is, but people in
the UK and the US may or may not. It's
(00:36):
kind of global now, isn't it so. But to talk
to our listeners about what November is, why it started,
and your involvement.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
In it for sure, Hence the global in my title.
I hope that the you're Irish and UK and US
listeners are onto it. But yeah, I'm very lucky to
work for the Mustache Factory. We're we're in our twenty
first year actually as a mental health organization, which is
pretty wild. Yeah. So begun in around two thousand and three,
(01:06):
a couple guys in a pub hanging out, going where
did mustaches go? What's going on there? They'd been working
as admin and creatives doing a lot of breast cancer
campaigns in that era, which was very, very big in
Australia at the time, and really they started to go,
(01:29):
who's talking about our health? Our wellbeing? Some of their
mates had suffered with mental health issues, their dads had
had prostate cancer, and so they started in earnest with
a couple. There was probably twenty of them. The month
of November, they said, all right, who can grow the
shittiest mustache year, Let's see how we go, and they
(01:49):
brought them back. This was before you know, hipsters. Every
man and his dog was growing the mustache for fun
and I just looked like Bora when I grow one.
But the the way in which it kind of moved
really organically was it started out, you know, with a
couple of guys raising some money. They tried to share
(02:11):
it with a couple of prostate cancer organizations who are like,
who are you fuck off? This isn't happening. And then
they came back the year after and they doubled the
amount that they'd raised, and suddenly everyone started to you know,
there iss started to prop up, and we went from
strength to strength to the point where over the past
you know, twenty one years or so, we have raised
(02:33):
over a billion dollars. As a ment Health were the
largest men's health organization in the world. We operated in
over twenty countries. We've got around four hundred staff. We've
got offices in London, in la in Toronto, in Melbourne,
and we, you know, have now moved beyond purely the
(02:57):
practical joke of growing mustaches to to really changing the
face of men's health. We are fundamentally investing in thousands
of programs in uh, you know, disadvantaged communities, in mental health,
in prostate cancer, in men's health more broadly, just trying
to actually galvanize the field and put money into research
(03:20):
and programs.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
That is incredible, And I feel rather embarrassed because I'm
clearly not up on.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
High but that's the point. I'm here to just blow
people's minds. That's the fun of it. We're sneaky. This
is sneaky grassroots stuff, Paul. We don't want to put
it in everyone's face, you know. It's it's so important
that this is by the people for the people. It's
not about being showy, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Yeah, because I'd spoken to the November guys pre covid
by actually coming into doing a talk for the stuff,
and it never actually happened, and I knew then that
they were growing but Jesus had no idea. Just high
much legs that it's actually got and you know that
massive expansion around the globe that is bloody awesome.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Yeah, So tell me what drew you as a psychologist
to start to focus on man's health.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
So yeah, I did obviously end up post PhD in
Masters at November, and I can talk about that journey.
But the reason I kind of got into mental health
I was I was really really focused on masculinity as
a you know, pretty much in like high school. I
was really interested in it. I've got two older brothers,
We've got a pretty competitive household, and I was like
(04:35):
a drama and music nerd, and I also played soccer,
and so I constantly was like shifting between hanging out
with the girls and hanging out with the guys. And
I felt.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Myself just just a quick one.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's I'm just trying to read my audience here.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Mate.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I would normally say football, I say footy, and then
people like, you've never played a life, what are you
talking about?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So I chamelelyoned my way through high school, really just
trying to you know, fit in belong, you know, have
mates and not be bullied is pretty much how most
most guys you know moved through the world. Don't don't
hit me. And as a result, I think I just
I started to learn to like be able to read
(05:22):
situations and read how people were responding in certain situations.
I got really really invested in understanding how people respond,
what their stories are, what drives them, what their fears are.
I was a pretty weird kid, I guess, and being
a third child, I think that that kind of happens.
You just you pay attention to dynamics in strange ways
(05:44):
and and try to peace make and all of that
type of stuff. And so moving through my dad was
a medical practitioner. I had a lot of interaction with
at risk populations. He worked in Sydney's King's Cross. There
was a lot of you know, heroin addicts and homeless people.
And I would go in, you know, once a week
(06:04):
and work with him as a teenager and just be
thrown in the deep end. And so I just had
a lot of interaction with a lot of different people
and a lot of different stories, and so psychology kind of,
you know, I was really drawn to it as a profession.
But as I started in my undergrad. I was one
of you know, a canful of guys in that degree,
(06:28):
and there were like two thousand people there and just
lots of girls, and most of the guys who were
there were just there to pick up, like that's kind
of how it went. So I was like, I can
actually if I stick at this, I think something's going
to happen here. And so I put in the time
and I loved it, and I just I stuck with it.
You know, I was at UNI for like nine years,
(06:49):
and throughout that journey, I just realized that no one
was talking about man, no one was talking about masculinity.
I was, you know, the only guy pretty much in
my master's call where I was seeing clients, and I
just kept seeing these guys come in and drop out.
I kept seeing them be misdiagnosed. I kept seeing this
glossing over of men's diverse, nuanced, intricate, beautiful lives, and
(07:15):
so I just went, this is this is a bit broken.
And so my PhD just started to really open up
that door and be like, why aren't guys seeking help?
What does this look like? And eventually it became pretty
clear that lots of men are seeking help heaps of
guys are going to therapy, but they're just not talking
about it or they're not getting what they actually want.
(07:35):
And so I spent quite a bit of time actually
then pivoting towards what happens on the other side of
the door, you know, what is taking place in therapy
that is not hitting the mark. And that's how I
kind of ended up in November. I sat down and
had a discussion with the executive director there where I
was like, you keep, you know, creating a movement that
(07:55):
is getting guys to open up, to be more vulnerable,
to have these conversations, but you're not checking what happens
on the other side. You're not making sure that when
they are vulnerable, what they are open, that someone is
ready to listen. Because inherently there's just this belief that
the system will work and that's just not the truth.
(08:17):
Like many many times men slip through the cracks, women
do as well. And so I pretty much you sold
to him. We need to make sure that clinicians are ready,
that the system is ready, and we need to actually
adapt to men's needs. And so that's what November, you know,
embraced me, and I became part of the team like
six years ago, and from strength to strength, I've been
(08:38):
able to take over our research team which is now
in a number of different countries and looks at not
only systems, it looks at masculinities, it looks at social media,
It looks at all of these different things that are
going on in men's lives and goes, how can we
talk to them about what's happening and how can we
actually offer them something that they want, not what you
(09:00):
think that they need.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Mm hm, that's really interesting. There's there's a couple of
things I want to jump into there. I want to
talk about the whole masculinity piece. And you know that
word is almost becoming synonymous with toxic today, and especially
because I got a fourteen year old boy, it's like,
(09:23):
you know, what do we tell these guys about?
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Because I'm hearing.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
A lot of I'm having an oscar coming home from school.
You know there is in school, there's respectful relationships, which
you're probably aware of. For our listeners, this is a
program throughout schools and it just seems to be at
least through through what we're hearing from him, it's this
is how men are bad.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
This is what not to do.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
This is how not to behave and nothing around talking
about values and virtues and how you should behave and
what good masculinity actually looks like.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
And and it's it's driving lots of men away. You'll
be aware of that's more than me.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
And they're going into the monosphere and listening to wankers
like Andrew Tiitt and stuff like that. Right, So, so
what what can we do, particularly with those emerging young
men who are going through their teens, they're trying to
find out they're clace in the world, and they're just
getting bombarded with all this negativity on one side and
(10:27):
all these deckheads on the other side saying, hey, come
in here, I'll show you something.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
So wanker is like, Andrew, that's a great quote. We're
gonna we'll take that one out. But I think that
something that is so important is, as you said, they
are trying to work out who they are. They're going
through and we all remember that that that identity molding,
that extreme discomfort of like trying to work out who
(10:56):
I am and where I belong. You need not only role,
you need messaging, you need structuring and scaffolding. You need
a process that provides you with growth opportunities and provides
you with a sense of aspiration and future orientation. And
the messaging at the moment is devoid of that. It
(11:18):
is filled with this mentality of what not to do,
what not to be, and it's a deficit focused view,
which for all intents and purposes, despite the fact that
there is a lot of harm that goes on, we
cannot excuse the fact that, you know, men and boys
are doing some bad shit across the globe, but we
(11:39):
need to find a way to lean into the good,
to exemplify the good, to talk about the fact that
there are silent heroes all over the place. You know,
this idea that there are incredible role models in dads
and teachers and grandfathers who are never on the front pages.
It's just the dickheads who are on the front pages
of the paper who take up all of our time.
(12:01):
And that's where toxicity comes from. So I have a
fundamental issue with that term. As you would expect, it's
very harmful. It's not useful. It does not provide any
structure for young men to adapt their behavior. All it
does is says, here is a blanket ban on this thing.
(12:21):
That you have inherited and you now have no ability
to change that at all. Like if it's said there
are toxic elements to the way in which masculinity is
socialized and you should try and consider this, that's a
different ballgame. But the media will never purport that the
narrative is just like this is broken, You're all fucked.
(12:43):
That's kind of how it looks at the moment. And
that type of problem orientation without any solutions is exhausting,
it's degrading to young men, and fundamentally, my main concern
with the topic is that it does not make anything
better if we are afraid of violence against women. Calling
(13:04):
men toxic will not fix that. That's my issue, and
so I'm really focused on building up young men and
showing them what is possible, in providing them with a
manifesto of health and well being, rather than letting them
be driven into the arms of these guys who have
(13:25):
a really clear doctrine of life that is do this,
do this, do this, date this woman, make this money,
buy this car, get this job, And it's all about
power and domination, and it is fueled by men's insecurity
and this feeling that they are constantly pressured to achieve
(13:47):
something when in fact, really what we should be doing
is going, hey, guys, life is very scary, it's tough,
it's uncertain, but here is a path that we can
all work walk together. Mah.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I love that, and we need a lot more of that.
It's one of those things and we see it so much. Right,
is that there's well intentioned programs that then are just
misguided and have lots of an intended consequences. And as
you rightly pointed out, the unintended consequences is pushing.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Man towards all the wanker spear wanker spit.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
But I think the thing is is that they're well intentioned,
and the one way that you can ensure that they
are going to actually hit the mark is by co
creating them with the audience. Sit down with the fourteen
year old boy and go does this pass the sniff test?
And they're going to be like, no, that sucks, that's boring,
that's stupid. Why are you talking to me like that?
(14:50):
I'm out? And then you go, all right, maybe this
won't work.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, And you know what, it's really interesting because my
wife sent an email and to the school that Oscar's
in exactly around that, saying.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Where are the workshops?
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Where are you talking to because Oscar's coming home and going,
you know, they're they're talking about guys thinking this. I've
never thought about that in my life, and it's almost like.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
A self fulfilling prophecis yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
And suggestibility right, and Oscar's going, gee, that's so weird,
and he's coming home, going this shit's weird.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Why don't why don't we assume that these young guys,
and I always say this about the manosphere, which I
think is really important that young guys, and We've got
so much research on this, they don't go in with misogyny,
they leave with it. They leave with it. They don't
go into these classes with misogyny. They sit there, they
hear all of this stuff. Then they end up in
(15:44):
this you know, shitty banter with their friends because they're
now being force fed content that seems at odds with
their values, and they leave with these ideas you know,
that are pretty pretty dark. And so I think that
what we should be doing is going, here is an
offering for us to say to you, we believe that
(16:04):
you have inherent goodness. We believe that this is what's
possible for you. Let's help you get there. Let's provide
you with the path, rather than here is the badness,
and we're going to assume that this is who you are.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah. Yeah, you need to rewrite the curriculum on respectful relationships.
That would be a big step forward. I'm absolutely serious.
I think one of the things I've been thinking about
this a lot, right, particularly with a fourteen year old boy,
is the lack of in the West a ride of passage.
(16:40):
I mean, I think that's pretty huge. Ide interview that
doctor his name escapes me just because my head is
full of PhD and book at a minute, but he
actually was a medical doctor. He saw a lot of
problems with boys and went into the whole heap of
research and so all round the world and many many
traditions a ride of passage for teenage boys to bring
(17:01):
them into to manhood. And and he's saying, you know,
that is missing in our lives in the Western world,
and and actually has started this movement on ride passage,
which is I think brilliant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Have you any.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Experience is that? Anna Rubs? Anna Rubins, Yeah, I apologize,
we got there.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
It was a brilliant podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, so no, I know, I know Ana's worked really
well and I think it's important. You know, I don't
know if you've heard of the Man Cave, which is
an organization that goes into schools and does you know
young men's programming. We fund them at November. We consider
ourselves like the big brother of the men's sector. There's
(17:42):
also Top Blokes, and there's tomorrow Man, and there's you know,
the Positive Masculinity movement. There's there's a lot of different
school based programs that are trying to do this type
of rights of passage in different ways because some of
them are shorter, some of them are actually camps that
are that are longer. It's it has taken off, and
I think that we should also point out that the
(18:03):
right of passage movement is a beautiful in many ways
indigenous tradition and you know, going back to country, for instance,
is something that you hear about so often. Adam Good
spoke about it when he was going, you know, through
the horrible experiences that he was, you know, copying all
of that racism in the AFL, he went back to
(18:23):
country to try and you know, reconnect and that's something
where you start to access your identity, access who you
want to be and what you want, you know, your
life to look like. We've lost sight of that. And
do I think that we need a really structured societal
process for young men to move between boyhood and masculinity
(18:45):
and manhood. Maybe not. Do I think that there needs
to be a clearer discussion about how that period looks,
who needs to show up, and what success looks like. Yesnally.
And the right of passage as a concept I think
is essential in many ways because you know, women go
(19:07):
through it biologically. You know, they have a literal turning
point where they go to womanhood pretty quickly, and that
happens mind and body for them, and there's a lot
of conversation around it, thankfully now used to be. We
have gone from a point where there probably used to
be far more discussion for young men as they moved
(19:29):
into that in manhood towards this let's not let's not
in a way wake up the beast. Let's not have
that conversation. We don't want to point at that. We're
just going to hope that it works out. And I
think that that pluralistic ignorance in some ways that idea
that if we just shy away from this thing and
(19:51):
don't look at it, it'll just work out has really
fundamentally failed. Rather than going we need to structure this.
We need to make sure the boys have a sense
of belonging, they have a sense of community values, they
have a sense of service and altruism. And when I
talk about masculinity, people always go, you can't define healthy masculinity.
(20:15):
All we can do is define toxic. And I was like,
I can define healthy masculinity. It's focused on leveraging masculine
traits flexibly, which is that things like service, altruism, you know, fatherhood,
generative fatherhood. There are lots of different things that exist.
Stoicism and self reliance in the right dose are extremely useful.
(20:39):
I know you think you know long and hard about
hardiness and grit and toughness. All of this stuff, when
applied effectively in the right time, at the right place,
that is healthy, positive masculinityrit large and we should not
shy away from having those conversations.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah, one hundred percent. Let's not jump over and talk
about therapy.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
So you have done a lot of reading and the
research into the area of gender sensitive therapy, and why
some traditional therapeutic modes.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Might not work as well for men. So just talk
to us about that.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And is there an element because you mentioned right at
the start that in your masters you know you'll be
the only guy. And I remember at university psychology was
the vast majority were females. Has that influenced the way
that therapy is done and therefore is not the best
approach for men? Or is there many other things that
(21:45):
play I'm sure there's quite a few things to play
into it.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, there are so many different things to play. I
think the fact that the vast majority of people who
come to therapy are women is probably more of a
factor than who is offering it. But you know, psychologists,
you know it's about eighty percent are women in the profession.
And I actually don't think that that is anything other
(22:08):
than a marketing failure. Like it's a damn good job,
like you know you've got, especially in this day and
age where everyone is being replaced with AI, I think
I have pretty good future aspirations to exist as a therapist.
I'm not being replaced anytime soon. And you know, you
have stability, you get paid pretty well. There's just this
(22:30):
belief that it's women's work. And I think that that's
a serious issue within our society that that type of
sitting in someone's distress, in someone's life, you know, for
a moment, is not considered to be men's work. I
hope that we're going to see a shift and that
more men are going to get into it. It's not
because women cannot treat men. Let me be really clear.
(22:50):
Women are just as good at offering therapy to men
as men are. It's just that more choice is always better.
You know, you want more gay therapists, more indigenous therapists.
You just want you know, greater Yeah, you know, diversity
so that someone can always see someone who they want to.
I think that that's really important. But when it comes
(23:12):
to the therapeutic model, you know, you'd understand that it is.
It's very much focused on emotional communication and vulnerability, two
things that are like fundamentally at odds with the way
that we're brought up as men. In many ways, also,
it's like, sit down and let's have an hour long
face to face conversation about your deepest, darkest thoughts. Talk
to me about your mother and your sex life, and
(23:34):
every guy is like, damn that that is not where
I want to be right now. And there are some, thankfully,
who are into it, and there are many who are
not socialized to that experience, and it's it's very uncomfortable
and foreign and unaccommodating in many ways for them. And
so what I try to do and what this training
(23:57):
that I've created through November with my team is called
Men in Mind, which is like, how do we actually
get therapists to upskill to realize that when men come
into therapy, they have a lot of beliefs and expectations
and attitudes and biases that are going to stop good
therapy from happening. Also, you as a therapist have a
(24:19):
lot of beliefs and attitudes about men. You might be
reading god knows what, and you've got toxicity running through
your brain and then a guy all tattered up comes
in and you've decided that he's a ship bloke. Yeah,
And the issue is, as we said before, you end
up with a self fulfilling prophecy where he's only going
to show you what you're looking for. And so the
(24:41):
aim is to open this up. That's what the aim
of this training is, which is to be like, let's
actually make masculinity not just some commentary bullshit that we're
reading constantly in our opinion pieces, but rather, let's go
beyond adolescence, the show that everyone wants to talk about,
and actually look at what is at the core here
(25:02):
of this guy's distress, which is often the way he
was brought up, the pressures that he has, the stress
that exists in his everyday life. And when I talk
about the fact that therapy is in many ways a
contradiction with masculinity, it's because many of these guys don't
have mental health issues in the stereotypical sense. What they
(25:25):
do have is situational stresses. They have financial distress and uncertainty.
They have, you know, stress around unemployment, they have financial
relationship difficulties. You know. The number one risk factor for
suicide in this country is not a history of depression.
It's past six months separation.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Really, it's breakup.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Breakup is the greatest risk factor for suicide. So if
anyone has a mate who has just gone through a divorce,
those six months are like crucial for jumping on and
offering support and services for guys. But we don't see that.
We go, oh, he's not depressed, This all happened out
of the blue. It didn't happen out of the blue.
(26:12):
You know, this stuff is so important that we realize
that things look and feel different amongst many guys when
they get depressed. For instance, there's a subgroup of men
who don't go into this like sad, crying, worthlessness whole.
They go into anger, irritability, and drug and alcohol use.
They go into externalizing. They send all of their distress
(26:34):
out onto the world, and it looks like men behaving badly,
it looks like shit behavior. But in many instances it
is a cry for help, and we just need to
get more attuned and sensitive. That's what gender sensitive treatment
is being attuned to the fact that if this guy
was brought up in this way with these parents, in
(26:56):
this world, he is going to respond to his internal
experience in this way.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
It's a really interesting point, and it's actually made me
think about stuff. I actually have three minutes in that
category in in my sort of large social group, and
and and and you know, there's a there's a bunch
of us, you know, making a concerted effort to get
around them.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
But it does this play into.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Just had of thought that that you know, the biggest
risk for suicide is my age group middle aged and
is a chunk of that because of that tends to
be the age where there are separations and divorces and
then men are not dealing with it when big factor.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
So the divorce, the divorces tend to happen. Yeah, at
forty to fifty, like, that's where most divorces take place,
and that's where the suicide rate is that its highest. Yeah,
that's forty four to fifty five year old age bracket.
It's it's for that group. And no one actually gives
a shit about men in the middle years, Like, it's
just not it's not a concern. Everyone is very focused
(28:09):
on young men, as they should be in many ways
because they are the future of our society. But when
you look at base statistics, we need to pivot to
start to focus on these guys because what happens is
that there is a long term suppression of emotion, There
is a long term breakdown in social connectivity. You know,
(28:30):
the number of friends that those guys have drops off
a cliff. Yeah, And so very lucky that you've got
at the vast majority of guys who are in that
age bracket who have kids have very few people to
call on when they're in a time of need, And
so they get to divorce and their whole social scaffolding
(28:52):
is gone. They literally don't have anything to stand on.
No one is there to wrap around them. Their wife
created all of the social events for them.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
That's a massive thing, isn't it is that most of
the social stuff is.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Driven by the wife and their friends.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And then when the divorce happens, vacuum choose and the
guys left on them of.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Course, because it's done. No fucking work do the work?
Like what like why is it that this is women's work?
And this is the thing women don't want to do that.
They don't want to arrange everything. You don't need to
be hopeless at this stuff like it is. And they
say this to guys all the time. This is fundamentally
life saving for you. You can go and have as many
ice baths as you want, but if you don't have
(29:34):
any mates, you're done. Like, it is essential that in
you when you're eighteen, when you're twenty five, when you're thirty,
no matter how important your job is, if you do
not spend time on your social connections, your life expectancy
will drop like that is the thing that keeps guys alive.
You look at the Harvard Longitudinal Study. Consistently, the only
(29:57):
guys who are alive in their nineties, regardless of whether
they smoked, what their diet was, what their exercise was,
the ones who had quality relationships are still alive. That
is essential, and that is why when you get to
your mid forties and you have a separation, you don't
have any friends around to call on when you're in
a time of need. You have extreme shame around all
(30:21):
of this that you have no vocabulary to describe, and
you have stigma around gunotherapy or the therapist doesn't connect
with you. It's a pretty bad situation. So we just
need to do a lot better at not only empathizing
with those guys and providing them with structures, we need
to make sure that they know that there are so
(30:42):
many like them out there and that they can connect
with one another. Because all they want, all of us want,
all the time, is this sense of connection and belonging.
And so when guys go, oh, I don't want to
pick up the phone, and guy seem nady, you know
that's always I don't want to, I don't want to
(31:03):
be vulnerable. I see nadiy blah blah blah. I'm like, mate,
I know that all you want is to hang out
with him, So like, we need to move past that
shame response that I might look weak for asking for
something when in fact your values are telling you I
need this, This is important to me.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Do you know one thing I often talk about in
my talks is the Hanoi Hilton prison camp in Vietnam
where they had something called the tap code. And I
interviewed Lee Ellis, who spent five and a half years
in that prison camp, and the tap code was away
when they were in solitary confinement, they could tap on
(31:45):
the walls and the pipes and communicate with each other.
And the research shows that that is the single biggest
predictor of PTSD and suicide and combat veterans is whether
or not they have social networks that they use.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
I'll tell you something, you know. I gave evidence to
the Royal Commission into Veterans Suicide and everyone was kind
of perplexed about the fact that the suicide rate is
so high in veterans. But I tell you, when it's
so high, it's not when they are active servicemen. It
is when they return. It's always when they return, and
I'll tell you why, because they have a sense of purpose,
(32:22):
meaning and belonging. And then the carpet is ripped out
from underneath them and they go, who am I? And
where is everybody? And that's literally what happens when men
just get into their forties, they go, wait a second,
I was having fun, all my mates are around, and
I actually didn't water the seeds. I did not help
my social life grow because it wasn't a priority. You
(32:45):
need to make it a priority. I sound like I'm
preaching here, but it's something that is so fundamentally simple
and is so disregarded. And I think that this notion
that like masculinity going your own way, being your own man,
is absolute bullshit. We are human beings and the way
in which masculinity flourishes is when we are in tandem
(33:09):
with other people.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You're preaching the correct palm. And actually, my wife so
because I'm ex military, right, I spent eight years in
the British military and they moved over to Australia. I
didn't know anybody.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And just you know, dove into work.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
And building my career and my wife one day said
to me, you need to go back and start playing football.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
And she was, actually, I always know, they always and yeah, exactly,
she she knew, she absolutely knew, and it was definitely
the best thing I'd ever did, right, because it's Deny,
this whole group that are around soccer and even though
we're not playing anymore, we're still hanging out and talking
(33:52):
and supporting each other.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
How much of the just to come back to the
therapy thing, how much of this is that men normally,
You know, if you're going to generalize, lots of females
have fierce to fierce conversations.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
They catch up over coffee and they sit in the
talk fierce to fierce. But with me and a lot.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Of it's shoulder to shoulder right in the pub, watching sport,
chatting and stuff like that. How much of that plays
into therapy because therapy is that fierce to fierce, which
as men are not as accustomed to in general.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Exactly. So there are two things here. The first is
that men are not beyond face to face conversation, So
we should never do this thing where we're like, we
have to completely adapt everything because they can't do it.
It might take longer, and so you build in systems
that are going to get you to that endpoint. But
let's not throw out the baby with the bath wat
(34:50):
and be like, men can't sit down and have our
long conversations because we're right here doing that. Yeah so yeah,
not true. But it does take longer, it is more uncomfortable,
it is more ful in many instances, and it's extremely foreign.
And so for those guys who do more of that
shoulder to shoulder, I think what's really important is that
that doesn't need to go away. That can exist within
(35:13):
the therapeutic setting. And this is what I try and
teach in this program, which is that just because you
decided as a clinician, yeah, or you were taught. Actually
I was always taught, and I was reprimanded if I
did anything different during my Masters that you must sit
in these two chairs. They must look the same. You
must be at this angle, you must ask these questions.
(35:36):
When I'm doing an assessment, I have to you know,
have my clipboard, blah blah blah. Very quickly I was
like fuck this, like this is not happening. I went
to Darwin from one of my placements, and I was
working with young indigenous kids, and it's like, if you
attempt to do any of that with them, you're done. Yeah,
And it's a baptism of fire to really learn that
very early, which was great. But what I do is
(36:00):
is I do what is necessary to get to the
same endpoint, which is to say, I've had ping pong
tables in my therapy room, I've had pool tables. I've
played Call of Duty with young guys, like when their
hands are busy, the ability for them to open up
is profound. And so this is what I mean. The
(36:21):
endpoint of interest is around openness and vulnerability and whatever
way it looks, how you get there. They do not
decide that it has to look like this. And so
I think that our therapy, you know, I've done running therapy,
there's adventure therapy, there's equine therapy. There are so many
different modes that are opening up. They're considered like crazy offshoots,
(36:45):
you know, but really what should be considered crazy is
the fact that we've decided that these four walls, this
is how you're going to talk about your trauma, like
wild And so I threw out the clipboard because I
was like, if I can't look at him or if
if I can't be there with him, he thinks I'm
a robot and my first two sessions or so, I'm
(37:06):
not going through his entire family history chronologically because he
doesn't talk like that normally. I talked to him about
surfing for twenty five minutes and how the waves were
this morning, and then in the last ten minutes he
dumps because he's calm, he's relaxed, he's been able to
be a human being. So just do what works and
ask him what he wants, and if he doesn't know,
(37:29):
co create it with him.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, I mean, I love that.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
I actually know somebody who went to see who was struggling,
really struggling, and went to see a psychiatrist who sat
behind a desk and quite far away from them with
a clipboard, just firing questions Adam and then just give him.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
A something for eleven minutes and asked for five hundred dollars.
But this is the thing, It's like the system is broken.
It's not any one individual who's going to be able
to change this. I can only see however many people
I can. That's why I'm trying to create system change,
because we need our training programs at our universities. We
need our you know, practitioner regulation, stuff like it's not
(38:11):
unethical to do treatment in a way that's going to
be beneficial. But they've created such strict bounds that we've
ended up actually shooting ourselves in the foot.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Yeah. Agree, My wife's going through a master's in counseling,
and it's so bloody rigid some of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
But I think you you become the artist.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
You find your way doing exactly.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Yeah, So let's let's let's come back to this suicide thing.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I remember my dad telling me. So he lives in
Ireland in an area whe there's a lot of farmers.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
And and he said, when Ireland, which is one of
the last countries in Europe to bring in the drink
driving laws with full force, he said, meal suicides in
farmers went through the roof and and and he saw
it in his area because these guys, a lot of
them were single. They work really, really hard, and then
(39:01):
a couple of times a week they'd drive into the
pub and have a few paints with their mates, sending
shoulder to shoulder, and as my dad has described it,
that was their church. And then when they brought in
the drink driving lots. If they had like more in
a paint, that was it. They were, they were done.
They'd lose their whole livelihoods. And he said they just
(39:22):
stopped coming, and suicides massively spiked. So and that comes
back to your early point about that that men need
those social networks, and we all need the social networks, but.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
But we're not as good at them as females.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
What other So you talked about the importance of that
in suicide prevention. What other approaches are promising in the
suicide prevention space for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
So we've been working at this for a long time,
and it's it's really central in some ways because I
you know, my my theasis was really folks is on
depression whenever I did that when I was a wee boy.
And it's funny how when you talk about men's mental
health you get dragged always into the pointy end of suicide.
(40:13):
It always goes there because it seems that that journey
and all of the other distress that kind of sits
in the middle, it's only the crisis that people are
willing to kind of deal with, that's where they want
to focus much of their attention when it comes to prevention.
It is about those early times. It's about getting on
(40:35):
this stuff around social connection, around relationship health, fundamentally, around
making sure that they understand what rejection looks and feels like.
You know, this idea that we can't be in control
and powerful and dominant of our relationships and in fact
it's a push pull always and it will not always
(40:56):
go your way. And learning how to regulate our emotions.
I would say that that is the one thing that
we are really struggling with as men, is our emotion regulation.
Everything kind of comes back to a sense of shame
and failure, I think for many guys, Yeah, which is
that I couldn't do this, I couldn't be this, I
couldn't achieve what I thought was necessary, and there's all
(41:18):
of these wood I should have could at things, and
this ability to go in your own mind. Actually, this
is what's happening right now. This is what I need
to do. This is how I need to calm myself down.
This is how I'm going to talk to myself in
a way that's going to soothe me and help me
move past whatever this feeling is. Instead, what happens is
(41:42):
that that feeling comes up and it is fundamentally intolerable
for many of these guys because they have not been
given the code to be able to actually respond to it.
And so you go from a twelve year old who
is you know, pre suspended for showing emotion in class
rather than sat down and spoken to about what he's
(42:04):
feeling and thinking. And then he's an eighteen year old
and he's drinking and drug taking and a girlfriend's just
broken up with him, and there's just seemingly no way
for him to overcome this feeling because it's just too
much for him. To the thirty year old who's just
had a kid and now he is suddenly in this
new world and he has no ability to understand the
(42:27):
extreme stress that he's feeling about being a protector and
a provider. It goes on and on and on, and
at some point it just becomes too much for some people.
And so what we need to do is get on
it early. But it's also never too late, Like there
are ways I've worked with sixty seventy year old men
who have so much trauma about things that happened to them,
(42:48):
you know, early on. And the thing about the Irish,
which was so lucky to learn from is this poetry,
this storytelling, this ability to make light of pretty dark situation.
And I think us men need to find a way
to realize that is deeply masculine, to make meaning of
what has happened to you, to describe it, to corral
(43:11):
those internal pieces and actually regulate those feelings rather than
try and push them further and further down with more drink.
You know, because like alcohol is a huge thing. It's
extremely social for many guys. It's the thing that gets
them out of the house, but they don't seem to
have any flexibility and like I can do other things
(43:32):
with my mates, you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Yeah, And I think that's where that's where sport, golf, soccer, whatever,
you know, really comes to the forward. But I wanted
to just come back to something you kind of started
talking about this, and I think it's kind of endemic
of our whole health care system is that we have
a set curse system, not a healthcare system. You know,
(43:57):
we weird until people are screwed and then we try
to treat them. And in the medical model, there's a
lot of drugs, as in psychology, a lot of drugs
that that that that you know, have limited effectiveness. So
if you were czar of the universe, right, what what
would you do?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
What sort of things would you implement? And and what
it is?
Speaker 3 (44:19):
And I think we've talked about some of them along
the way, but just just you've got that magic wand
nigh what.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Would where would you start? And where would you go?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I don't want this trumpy and power. But the what
I what I would do, I think is I would
I would totally agree that I would focus heavily on
health and well being. I would focus on like you
don't remember any of the arithmetic that you did at
fucking school, Like none of that holds. You need a
certain amount, you need the building blocks. And then we
(44:49):
need to focus on life skills. We need to focus
on our emotional inner world in a way that is
not feminized, that is not at odds with the way
and we're we're brought up, but is actually directly tied
to our sense of self and so doing values work,
doing rights of passage, doing ideas of you know, spending
(45:10):
a period a month you know at school, going who
do you want to be? Not? What do you want
to be? Not I want to be a five? This
is always a thing that everyone is asking kids, what
do you want to be? It's who do you want
to be? It's it's and how are you going to
get there? And it's not about this aspiration of I
need to be a CEO, I want to be an entrepreneur.
(45:31):
That's what's killing us. It's this idea of achievement rather
than that hard work of self determination and growth, you know.
And so what I would focus on is building up
those course skills around making sure that our communities are
actually interlinked and tightly bound in ways that they used
(45:52):
to be for our grandparents, where people would have neighbors
that they would talk to, God forbid, Like I don't
know where that went, you know, absolutely. You know, we
can talk about tech and social media, like there's a
whole thing going on there which is harming everybody and
is leading to serious brain rot and an inability to
actually be in the present moment. And anxiety is going
(46:12):
through the roof with that as well. Let alone pornography
and all of these other situations which are really harming men. Pornography, gambling, alcohol,
seriously undermining men's ability to show up for themselves and
their families and so and that leads to this spiral,
you know. And so if I am the Cizar, I
(46:34):
am focused really heavily on connection, on understanding your emotional
experience and being able to discuss and describe it, and
making sure there are some schools that you know that
I've worked with where every boy sees a psychologist once
a month. You know, we should have a public school
system where I don't want to see you when you're sick.
(46:54):
I have no interest in that be because when you're depressed,
I need to actually like get you out of bed.
I need to get you going to work. That's not therapy.
Therapy is building you up. It's creating that resilient scaffolding
so that you can continue on when you're down in
the dumps. That's that's not where the work happens. And
(47:17):
so it's really important that we actually see psychology as
dental care preventative. Once every six months, give me a
give me a check up, check my gums. You know.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, I know that that is very powerful. Is there
anything that November are doing in this space?
Speaker 3 (47:36):
Yeah, because because because this is this is the stuff
that I'm really pastiate at about is like how do
you how do you head this off at the past,
and how do you give people a guide a scuffold
as you say, to live the good life? And and
and actually, just before I finished the question, I think
you know I'm not religious. I'm a recovering Catholic from
(47:57):
Northern I don't have been in recovery for forty years.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
But I think part of the overall problem.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Is the breakdown of religion, although I'm not a massive
fan of it, because it gives people a set of
values and a guide from how to for how to live,
but also a community.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
And then you're taken you're taking that away, and people.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Need to then go and do the work, particularly about
what sort of a person do I want to be?
Speaker 1 (48:23):
What sort of values do I have?
Speaker 3 (48:24):
And if you don't have anybody steering them, then often
that is outsourced to social media and these tribes and
social media that that can become really destructive.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
So sorry, but that that that turned into a rantom.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
The moral fabric. When you when you had really clear
institutions that provided community, there were scouts, there's rotary churches,
and they all fell apart because they were all corrupt.
And that this is the issue. How do we create
safe male only spaces as well, you know, how do
we create places that are actually going to not be
(49:06):
abuses of power, that are not going to be corrupt,
and that are actually going because there was a lot
of health that came with that, there was a lot
of benefit. It just so happens that we actually unraveled
all of it rather than some of it, which I
think is problematic. But what my Vember is doing, We've
got programs all over the globe and we fund you know,
(49:28):
some of the school based stuff. We fund a program
and we created it called Ahead of the Game, which
is a sport mental health and resilience training and so
we go in. We're partnering with the AFL on this
at the moment, and we're actually partnering with Gaelic Football
as well in Ireland. And what we do is we
(49:48):
go into a club, into a community club. This is
not elite, it's at the grassroots and you go in
and you give a program on understanding and responding to
your own mental health issues, building up resilience in these
young guys. But something that we do that is so
important is that we also train the coaches and the
parents because you have to have the ecosystem because what happens.
(50:10):
And this is, you know, something that I'm learning a
lot of in the violence prevention space is I do
more of it. When you go and you tell a
boy at thirteen, this is what you need to do
to be a respectful man, and how to you know,
not be misogynistic and violent and whatever. If he goes
home and his dad is beating his mum, none of
that matters. Build an ecosystem of health and well being
(50:35):
and safety for a young kid, and he will feel
like he exists within a place that makes sense. He
exists with rules that he can follow. He exists with
an aspiration that he can achieve because his coach and
his dad is playing the game with him, you know.
So that's you know, one really key program that we're
(50:56):
rolling out across the globe. And I continue to spend
most of my time with my team researching how we
can get this no do gap being a bit shorter,
so knowing and actually implementing, because at the moment, it's
just like Ivory Tower. Let's all sit up here and
churn out PhDs and they don't go anywhere. My team,
(51:18):
who all have PhDs, are fundamentally obsessed with translation, and
I need to make sure that when we find something,
it gets into the hands of guys quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
I love that. That translation and closing the knowing doing gap.
I talk about that all the time and health behavior
change right, because a lot of people know what they
need to do, but they're not. I want to want
to talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences. I
know we've got a limited time here, but I remember
talking to Professor John Reid, who's done a lot of
(51:52):
research in this sorry, and said that psychologists and therapists
and survey said he did only twenty five percent of
them ever ask somebody about whether they had adverse childhood experiences,
and he's like, they are their biggest driver of mental
health issues. What's your thoughts on that and high and
(52:14):
when do we intervene and how is that different from
somebody who hasn't had those adverse childod experiences that are
setting up their view.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Of the world.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Well, when we talk about upstream and downstream, you know,
we've spoken about prevention and how we're going to get
ahead of this stuff. Nothing that we do is going
to be more important than dealing with aces with adverse
childhood experiences. It is the bedrock of mental health issues,
of violence in our society, of basic trauma that is
(52:44):
leading to personality difficulties, that is leading to alcohol and
substance misuse, and we have it rife within our society
and no one is willing to look at it. So
whether it is violence in the home, whether it's sexual
child sexual abuse which is amongst young men, and nobody,
nobody is willing to call this out. It is so
(53:06):
so common and it is having such untold effects across
the lifespan. If we get onto this stuff early, if
we are willing to say we need to focus on
our young people, we need to focus on children fundamentally
and safeguard them from this stuff and build services for
them so that we can actually nip it in the
(53:27):
bud so that they're not the forty year old man
who is now perpetuating violence because he knew nothing else.
He knew nothing else. There are so many ways that
if we get onto this stuff early and we actually
say this matters, This matters to us as a society
to expunge this behavior and to make sure that children
(53:48):
can live safely and happily as they should as children,
and to not stigmatize them when they enter into a
service with stuff like this, because that's what happened. They
come in and they're just too complex, the behavior is
too disordered, et cetera. I really think that that is
(54:10):
at the core of our future success here is going
to be how we actually respond to child maltreatment.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, and it's a big, soorny wiki problem, I think,
as is the whole mental health stuff. But mate, you
and November November are are our trading and awesome bloody path.
So I tip my hat to you, and I tip
my hat to the organization and the massive growth of
the organization because God is this needed. It is just
(54:41):
so needed. So so thanks for everything you do, Thanks
for everything your organization does, and thanks for sharing your
knowledge on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
I could speak about this stuff for days.
Speaker 3 (54:52):
But I know you've got to go.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
But may that was bloody awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
I'll be back. Thanks a lot more.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
The long way
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