Hello everyone! I have a bit of a different blog post for you today. One of my last university assignments for second year was to write a feature article for a magazine. Since this is what I want to be doing for a career when I graduate I was extremely excited for this project and decided to do it on a topic I feel extremely passionate about. Ths assignment gave me so much stress trying to find interviewees and making sure I had all the facts right for such a sensitive topic but I really found it rewarding in the end and wanted to share it with you all - not least because this is a topic that needs to have awareness spread about it.
"I personally believe that men (young men) have to know that this isn't the 1960's anymore. Our culture has changed massively. It's ok for men to cry just as much as women." 23 year old Frzer discusses with me about his struggle with mental illness and his opinion on the stigma that surrounds men opening up.
In some ways, it may feel that in 2017, equality of the sexes is all around us; dads are equally invoved in raising their kids and women are just as sucessful in business. Unfortuneately, in some other ways it feels like the progress is painfuly slow - the stigma around men talking about their feelings being one of them.
And the results of this stigma are proving to be detrimental - the rates for suicide is three times highers for males that it is for females (Office for National Statistics). Yet women in the UK are more likely than men to have a common mental disorder and twice as likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. (Mentalhealth.org)
At first glance, these statistice may not make much sense in the same paragraph, but mental health professional Dr. Annika Ashforth says "from experience, women tend to be more open about admitting the have a problem, and can express their feelings. Men generally tend to bottle everything up and then explode.
However, while progress might seem slow, there is a definite shift in opinions in this subject starting to occur. High profile figures such as prince Harry and Freddie Flintoff, to name a few, are coming forward to discuss how they have struggles. Charities such as CALM (campaign against living miserably) and Men- Tell Health are working hard to raide the profile of the cause. " Everyone has feelig and the more we make sense of them and express ourselves, the better things will be. There are services out there to help with this... you don't have to be all alone." Says Dr Ashforth.
And even though males still have the highest rates of suicides, these figures are decreasing every year. The best thing we can do is carry on encouraging te conversation and supporting men as best we can when they do decide to speak out.
If you would like to find out more or feel you need help vist:
Please read the full version of this article here
Thank you so much for reading and please share this so we can keep the conversation going!
Love, Yasmin
xxxx
Those stats and facts make me really sad to hear, especially because I'm a really empathetic person and also pretty damn expressive of my own feelings (although it is frustrating at times to express feelings and always be told you're the 'sensitive' one!) but to think that people are bottling things up because they feel like they aren't able to come forward those feelings is really awful!
ReplyDeleteJulia // The Sunday Mode