Patriarchy Is Killing Men Too: The Mental Health Crisis

The numbers are stark. Men account for nearly **80% of suicides** in the United States, 70% in the UK, and 65% in India. Men are half as likely as women to seek mental health treatment. Men die, on average, five years younger than women, with a significant portion of that gap attributable to preventable mental health conditions and substance abuse. These are not niche statistics. They are a **public health emergency** — one that has been unfolding for decades while receiving a fraction of the attention devoted to other crises.

And yet, when feminists raise the issue of men's mental health, they face a paradox. The same patriarchal system that damages men's mental health also produces the gender-based violence, structural inequality, and cultural misogyny that feminism exists to fight. How do feminists engage with men's suffering without centering it, without deflecting from women's oppression, and without reinforcing the notion that patriarchy is somehow equally harmful to both sexes?

The Patriarchal Wound

The answer begins with a clear-eyed analysis of **who created the system** and who benefits from it. Patriarchy was not designed by women. It was constructed by and for men — specifically, by elite men seeking to maintain power over other men and all women. The emotional repression at the heart of patriarchal masculinity was not imposed on men as an unfortunate side effect. It was a **deliberate strategy** to produce men who would fight wars, accumulate capital, and suppress dissent without questioning the system.

But the strategy has costs, and men bear them. **Terrence Real**, a therapist and author who has worked with men for over three decades, describes patriarchy as a system that asks men to be "above the human" — to suppress vulnerability, connection, and emotional expression in favor of dominance, stoicism, and self-sufficiency. The result, Real argues, is not strength but **"a kind of death"** — a slow erosion of the capacity for genuine human connection.

The research supports this framing. A **2023 study** published in the American Journal of Men's Health found that men who most strongly endorsed traditional masculine norms — emotional stoicism, self-reliance, dominance — were 2.5 times more likely to experience depression and 3 times more likely to die by suicide than men who endorsed more flexible gender identities. Patriarchal masculinity is not protective. It is **toxic** in the most literal sense — it poisons the men who internalize it.

"Patriarchy does not merely harm women. It wages a quieter war against men's capacity to be fully human."

The Feminist Responsibility

Here is where the analysis gets uncomfortable for feminists, and where intellectual honesty is required. Some feminist commentators have argued that men's mental health is a "men's issue" — that feminism's job is to fight patriarchy, and men can deal with the damage patriarchy does to them on their own time. This position is understandable. Feminism has spent decades being told that it must also address men's issues — a demand that has often been a bad-faith attempt to derail feminist work.

But dismissing men's mental health entirely is both strategically and ethically problematic. Strategically, it cedes the ground to **anti-feminist movements** — the "manosphere" of influencers like Andrew Tate, who exploit men's genuine suffering to recruit them into misogynist ideologies. Every young man who is struggling with depression, isolation, and emotional suppression is a potential recruit for movements that blame feminism for his pain. Feminism cannot afford to leave that space unoccupied.

Ethically, the matter is simpler. **Feminism is a movement against all forms of gender-based oppression.** Patriarchal masculinity is a form of gender-based oppression — one imposed on men by other men, but oppression nonetheless. The feminist commitment to dismantling gender hierarchies does not vanish when the hierarchy harms men. It simply insists on context: men's suffering under patriarchy is not equivalent to women's suffering under patriarchy, and solutions must not center men at women's expense.

What Feminist Engagement Looks Like

Practically, feminist engagement with men's mental health means several things. First, it means **naming the problem correctly**. Men's mental health crisis is not a "gender neutral" issue. It is a gendered issue with gendered causes. Patriarchal norms of emotional suppression, the stigma around male vulnerability, and the cultural association of help-seeking with weakness are all products of a gender system that feminism has analyzed for over a century.

Second, it means supporting **male-identified spaces** that are genuinely progressive, not regressive. Organizations like **CALM** (Campaign Against Living Miserably) in the UK and **The Good Men Project** in the US create spaces where men can discuss mental health without retreating into anti-feminist resentment. Feminists can and should support these efforts — while maintaining clear boundaries around misogynist content.

Third, it means challenging the **weaponization** of men's mental health against feminism. When anti-feminist actors claim that "feminism causes male suicide" or that "men's issues are ignored because of feminism," feminists must respond with evidence and clarity. The evidence is clear: patriarchy, not feminism, is the primary driver of men's mental health crisis. Feminism offers men a way out of the patriarchal trap — if they are willing to accept it.

The Mutual Liberation Framework

The concept of **mutual liberation** — the idea that dismantling patriarchy benefits everyone, including men — is not new. bell hooks articulated it beautifully in *The Will to Change: Men, Love, and Power*, arguing that feminism "offers men the chance to be truly free — free to be fully themselves, without the armor that patriarchy demands."

This is not a concession. It is a strategic insight. A feminist world is one where men are not trapped by rigid gender expectations, where emotional expression is not punished, where vulnerability is not weakness. These are feminist values. They happen to also be values that would dramatically improve men's mental health outcomes.

"Feminism does not ask men to sacrifice their well-being for women's liberation. It asks men to recognize that their well-being depends on liberation from the very system that claims to serve them."

The men's mental health crisis is everyone's problem because it is a symptom of a broken gender system — a system that feminism has diagnosed more accurately than any other intellectual or political movement. To ignore this symptom would be to abandon the most comprehensive analysis we have. To center it would be to betray the women whose suffering remains the movement's primary concern. The path forward is neither avoidance nor centering, but **honest engagement** — acknowledging men's pain without letting it eclipse women's, and offering solutions that dismantle patriarchy rather than reinforcing it.