Interesting article - if only 15% of American men talk about their mental health with their "close friends" them and I have a different definition of what a friend is!
Yeah, well, you need to cut through layer upon layer of social conditioning telling you people rely on you to be strong. Not vulnerable, but more like a rock. If you’re going to be sad or some such, we prefer you to show anger instead. Because that shows strength. Overall society is doing its best to keep passing that along to the next generation as a gift that keeps on giving.
Counterpoint. I just met someone who started telling me about their bipolarity within the first five minutes of meeting. It was pretty obviously functioning as a trophy for them. This is a pretty stereotypical kind of modern bore. See also https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/trauma-is-indeed-like-a....
I disagree that society is "doing its best to keep passing that along". The statistics also show that those under 50 are twice as open to mental health talk with close friends. While the idea of men being expected to be a "rock" isn't dead, I think it has changed somewhat. At least for my family/friends, while there is still a big expectation of being emotionally "strong", that doesn't come with the expectation of coming off as invulnerable.
What is a friend (and how does that differ from a close friend)?
Frankly, I don’t even talk about mental health with my wife, and I would say she is my best friend. I imagine this is cultural, but I’m not sure what that means. It’s not like anyone ever said to me, hey, never talk to your friend in private about mental health. And that isn’t something I’d expect people to talk about in public with each other where I could learn from observation. In other words, it doesn’t feel like something that is learned from explicit teaching or from observation. So, where is it learned from?
I think learning from omission is a real thing. If you never observed anyone doing it, then why would you? When I was growing up, no one ever talked about mental health or therapy, so I didn't even realize it was an option until college when I met others raised in a different culture.
But, where would you observe it? It isn't the kind of thing people talk about in public, usually. I know my wife and her friends discuss mental health issues, but they have never done so in front of me. Those discussions only happen in private.
The only thing I can figure is that as teenagers girls discuss mental health issues and they learned it from slightly older teenage girls who themselves learned it from their own slightly older teenage girls when they were younger.
Yeah, I grew up where it was not common to talk about either. I think I mostly picked it up from significant others, and from joining a community for awhile where it was much more common to talk about those sorts of things. I'm glad that I did!
The poll only counts people who talk about it "often or extremely often".
It actually seems crazy to me that the number is so high for younger age groups:
> And young adults are more likely to say they often talk about their mental health with close friends: 37% say this, compared with 29% of those 30 to 49 and 14% of those 50 and older.
That's a lot of mental health talk. I suspect you won't see this amount of mental health talk in places with good average mental health.
I think younger people have a much broader definition of "mental health". Somebody 50+ might say "mental health, like a mental hospital? no thanks", somebody in Gen Z might say "fr fr i always talk about how stressful school is with my homies".
The older crowd is much less likely to advertise to one another that they have a shrink, whilst Gen Z is gonna jump on their phone after a session and say "yoooo guess what my therapist told me today" to their group text chat, so I'd say GenZ talks a ton more about mental health than older cohorts, not simply that they have a broader definition.
