Sarah Harte: Ireland's new counselling services for young men are badly needed
(Left to right) Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, and Erin Doherty who starred in 'Adolescence' for which they won Emmy Awards recently. The Netflix drama had us hotly discussing what goes on in the minds of disaffected boys and who might be influencing them. Photo: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
The actor Stephen Graham has won an Emmy for his lead role in .
In March, the Netflix drama that he co-created had us hotly discussing what goes on in the minds of disaffected boys and who might be influencing them. Graham has highlighted the challenges faced by men and boys. He has also spoken about a past suicide attempt.
He’s not the only person concerned about young men. Last week, a male colleague instructed me to pass on a compliment to a young male with whom we had been working.
He followed up by saying that “it’s important you pass on my comments about his aptitude because there is little enough that the culture offers boys now.” It’s a bleak view that set me thinking.
Certainly, the data paints a less-than-rosy picture for men in general where mental health is concerned. According to a recent article in the , “males account for three in every four suicides in Ireland and are up to twice as likely as females to eventually die by suicide following a hospital presentation for suicidal crisis.”
What is also worrying is that a majority of men presenting to emergency departments with suicidal feelings had no link with mental health services.
So, who do men, and in particular young men, talk to? The Irish singer-songwriter Cian Ducrot is currently promoting a newly released report, The Real Face of Men’s Health, which confirms that 80% of all suicides in Ireland are male.
Ducrot is articulate on the topic of masculinity and mental health. He has said that “talking to your friends is probably the hardest”. Having lost two male friends to suicide, he feels “it's hard to open up”.
His advice is to delete all social media, although that’s not feasible for him due to his career. And with regard to social media, we know that many young men seek solace and support online, where they find a sense of community within online groups.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have heard of the manosphere. It’s where a new form of patriarchy, misogyny and chauvinism is doing a brisk trade. Moral panics are pointless, but working in domestic violence, this is something we’re very concerned about.
Teachers and an array of experts have been warning for years that prominent, brash male figures are selling young men the message that they must band together and reclaim their rightful male dominance.
At the relatively more benign end of the spectrum is Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. I know several men who are impressed by his take on personal responsibility.
If you unpack his manifesto, though, while slickly packaged, there is a lot of regressive stuff about gender roles, which are based on women being more submissive.
Thanks to recommender algorithms (more of those later), mainstream figures like Peterson can become an entry point to more toxic figures, such as cartoon kickboxer Andrew Tate. Tate calls himself a misogynist and purports to teach young men how to become rich and bag ‘attractive women’.
With 10.8 million followers on X, he has been the subject of claims of sex trafficking as well as alleged coercive control and rape claims from several women in a civil law context.
I watched his video, today. It’s laughably simplistic, but apparently not to some unformed young men for whom he is emblematic of a successful life path.
The question isn’t simply around what content young men find online, but what drives them to seek support from online reactionary voices in the first place.
Are they detached from life in a familial, social, or cultural context? And how do we reclaim them from malevolent buffoons like Tate who influence views, values, and outlooks?
There are no pat answers because it has always taken a village to raise a child, and maybe that is even more true in a complicated world. There are some positives.
Our new online safety code represents a significant step forward in compelling tech companies to monitor content more closely, protecting children from harm. However, the code failed to outlaw recommender algorithms, the sort that push users from men like Peterson toward characters like Tate. You’d wonder why? Lobbying?
Nevertheless, any solution to reclaiming young men from the clutches of online influencers goes deeper than solely reining in tech companies. It requires us to look at the broader culture and how we socialise young men.
Why do they still feel they have to be stoical and silent? As Cian Ducrot said, opening up and talking to friends about mental health difficulties and problems is the hardest thing of all.
Which is why the news that new counselling services, specifically tailored for men, have been introduced this month is most welcome.
The sessions are free and made available through GPs, a HSE helpline, and yourmentahealth.ie website. There are in-person and over-the-phone sessions.
The counselling is targeted at men responding to their specific needs, which makes sense because apparently the epidemiology of suicide differs significantly between the genders.
In the States, where the suicide rate amongst men is roughly the same as here, gender-sensitised strategies for men’s mental health difficulties have been found to be effective in countering “problematic, masculine messages of self-reliance and interpersonal dominance.”
The minister for health, Mary Butler, when announcing the new measures, confirmed that women were far more likely to seek help, with two-thirds of all people currently seeking counselling being female. A much-needed national campaign, she said, will therefore aim to reduce the stigma around men seeking help.
On the subject of troubled young men, the new film , starring Cillian Murphy, highlights the difficulties in dealing with boys who have resolutely fallen through the cracks.
These juvenile delinquents, one step away from prison, want to find a path out of their mayhem, or, as one character said, just to “clear the weather in his head”. Most of them have no idea how they ended up where they did.
The concept of good citizenship holds no meaning for them. But instinctively, they know they are missing a key part of the jigsaw puzzle of how to live.
It’s a tough watch but a worthwhile one, although the drum and bass soundtrack might prove hard going for the longer in the tooth. Murphy, as usual, delivers a brilliant performance as a charismatic yet struggling teacher. Incidentally, it will be available on Netflix from October 3.
I was the sole woman in the cinema last Friday for . When the lights went up, two young men, Stephen and James from Drimoleague and Dunmanway, both cinema buffs, a barber and a student in social care gave me their time and their thoughts.
Two more articulate, refined young men you couldn’t meet. They loved the film and had attended a Q&A at the Cork Opera House about the film the week before. They gave me great hope about young men, but not everyone is so fortunate.
There are young men out there seeking connection in the wrong places, and we have to help them because it’s a problem for us all.
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