Yesterday, a friend of mine pointed me towards a new Beyond Blue mental health campaign Man Therapy. I was interested reading the Mission Statement of the campaign:
The social norms of masculinity play an important role in the gender differences of suicide. Men have a greater tendency not to recognise or respond to their own negative emotions or distress, partly due to the stigma associated with ‘mental health’, which in turn may result in clinical depression. Through tackling the rate of depression and anxiety in men, and reducing stigma, facilitating a change in men’s behaviour and challenging perceptions of masculinity, beyondblue believes that a reduction in the male suicide rate can be achieved in the medium to long term.
That first line stood out to me – “the social norms of masculinity play an important role in the gender differences of suicide.” I tend to agree, but looking at the site I am not convinced it does any work to help break these norms down. The videos posted are of a typically ‘blokey dude’ talking in a particularly blokey manner about how blokes need to do something about mental health problems. Go through the site and you get a whole bunch of blokey cliches.
Now, I fully appreciate why Beyond Blue has done this in this way. I get that this is a way to break down stigma for a particular subset of guys. And I can see how getting a blokey dude to talk about depression can help deal with this.
But as a man who has suffered depression these sorts of advertising campaigns sometimes bother me. Facing up to depression and anxiety as a man, the vast majority of programs targeted at me told me that as a man I clearly had trouble dealing with my feelings and therefore owning up to them was what I needed to do. Depression advertising says that men have trouble dealing with depression, which naturally means that women have a much easier time talking about their feelings because they are the more emotional kind.
As a dude who is both blokey and has traditionally ‘feminine’ attributes (i.e. I can talk about feelings at times) this sort of advertising doesn’t really speak to me. I do alright talking about my feelings at times, but still needed help, and struggled with dealing with my issues. For me, the campaigns like this just played into ideas of gender normativity. And the ‘feminine’ dudes of ‘butch’ women, and everybody in between seem to miss out.
And so I guess I have to ask, how do we both deal with stereotypes of masculinity, whilst not buying into traditional gender norms? We seem to have created a world where we say we need to break down stereotypes for one issue (depression), yet to do so we just buy into traditional stereotypes to get it done. It seems to me that the real issue here is gender norms in themselves.