Movember: Great Moustaches, Terrible Mental Health Infrastructure

We’ve nailed the slogans and motivational posters. Now it’s time to build the bloody scaffolding underneath them

Welcome to Bearly Politics - where I take my stick and poke at politics, power and the weird way in which the UK handles both. I’m The Bear, and today’s post is about Mental Health - men’s mostly, though not only - and what happens when awareness doesn’t translate into access. It’s also, if I’m being very honest, about trying to stay human in a country that makes it increasingly hard to be one.

If you’re new here, welcome - if you’re a regular, welcome back.

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November, if you hadn’t noticed, is officially in full swing.

The leaves have all turned, poppies are appearing on lapels and somewhere in a Sainsbury’s warehouse I’m convinced that there’s a nervous manager begging a team of night-shift workers to do all they can to hold back the tsunami of Christmas decorations and tat that’s supposed to flood the country for just. One. More. Week.

It is, without being hyperbolic, chaos season - the time of year that the UK slides from thoughtful autumnal melancholy and nostalgia straight into uncontrolled festive hysteria.

In between all that noise though, there is something else that happens this month - something that I personally am very, very fond of - moustaches start appearing.

Everywhere.

Who knew a Lego man could be so compelling - Photo by Alan Hardman on Unsplash

Every office, gym, hospital corridor and corner shop suddenly looks like every man walking through it has decided to do a tribute act to Tom Selleck - whether that be patchy, defiant, endearing or full blown sexy. Movember is very much here and, frankly, it is without a doubt the sexiest time of the year¹.

Under all the charm, bravado and whiskers though there is something deeper going on, because Movember, beneath the cheeky posters and fundraising stunts is about mens health, and what I’d like to discuss with you all today is specifically mens mental health, a subject that at times knocks the wind from me a little bit.

Because as much as I adore the humour and confidence of the campaign, I can’t help but feel that for the past few years, despite some excellent work, we’re still only skating on the surface of the issue of the mental health of men.

Don’t get me wrong here - we’ve gotten absolutely brilliant at talking about mental health - we’ve plastered “it’s okay not to be okay” on billboards, mugs and train platforms. But I’m not convinced that we are actually okay okay.

We’ve managed to destigmatise the conversation, yes, but we’ve done it in what could be the most British way possible - politely, vaguely and with no apparent plan or plot on what happens next. We’ve created a situation where we have awareness, but no access and understanding without infrastructure. We tell people very honestly and earnestly to open up - and when they do, we hand them a leaflet and tell them there’s a six month waiting list.

I was chatting about this with a mate of mine quite recently - a funny and seemingly unshakeable friend - and he told me that he finally got himself to the GP because the weight caused by anxiety on his chest had started feeling like an actual physical object.

“They were lovely,” he told me, “but they offered me six sessions of therapy - I can barely get through describing my anxiety about work emails in six sessions.”

He said it like a joke - but there was truth in that jest. Six sessions is a lovely round, nice, administratively tidy number that looks efficient while at the same time being utterly ridiculous in terms of the outcome you can expect.

And that, unfortunately, is the story of men’s mental health in the United Kingdom - bureaucracy made to look tidy with the loveliest of slogans, served with a side of well-meaning apathy. We’ll of course be sure to clap for you for finally admitting you’re struggling (yay self-awareness!), but we will absolutely make sure that there’s yet another questionnaire for you to pore over which reads like it’s questing for horoscope type answers about your life².

Which unfortunately creates the situation that we’re now in a world where though the approach to mental health for men has changed, the rules are still very similar. The stiff upper lip, the stoic endurance and the “I’m fine, mate” reflex - they’re all still there - they’ve just had a mindfulness app makeover.

The message has gone from “big boys don’t cry” to “feel your feelings, but don’t be surprised if there’s no one to help you with that.” Cry if you must, but know that help is delayed.

It’s no wonder to my mind that many men are so desperately exhausted - because while the stigma is slowly disappearing, the expectations haven’t really.

I would also add that there is a flaw in one of the beliefs here - that “men don’t talk.” Men do talk - we just don’t always give them anywhere decent to talk to. We’ve built an entire culture that treats loneliness like a bit of a personality quirky and exhaustion like a badge of honour and then act shocked when people start to fall apart on their own in their kitchens.

We need to zoom out here for a moment as well though, because men’s mental health doesn’t exist or happen in isolation - it’s directly tied to things like housing, money, work, loneliness and identity. They’re what we call the “social determinants” when it comes to policy, but what they basically mean is that life, at the moment, is bloody hard - and no one is making much attempt to make it any easier.

When you can’t afford rent, when your job is precarious, when your body hurts from labour or your constantly filling up inbox makes your body think there’s a sabretooth tiger sitting behind you - these aren’t things you can meditate yourself out of. “Mindfulness” is going to mean sweet blue fuck-all to you when you’re busy calculating how to make £47 last for a whole week.

Yes, talking absolutely does matter - but what matters even more than that is making sure that people have a life that’s worth staying around for. We can’t keep making out that despair is on the back of a personal failing when it’s so often these days down to the natural reaction of systems that are actively grinding people down.

Have a think about how men are handled in times of crisis - how often it’s treated as a comms issue instead of a capacity issue. “We just need to get them to talk” falls flat on its arse when what we need to do is get men heard and acknowledged. There’s a desperate need for the words that men are saying to land somewhere.

There are still not nearly enough walk-in crisis centres available - actual real ones, not the kinds that close at five in the afternoon or need a referral that takes weeks to process. There are far too few affordable counsellors, local peer groups and spaces where men can exist without feeling like a case file. When someone finally says, “I just can’t do this anymore,” the answer simply cannot be “thank you for telling us, we can maybe see you in twelve weeks.”

Because sometimes, and this is a very hard truth, people don’t have twelve weeks.

I know that this is going darker and darker, so I do want to acknowledge something - there are bright spots that have been happening. Places that are, far too quietly, getting it right. Things like Walking Football Clubs, that have had great positive impact on men’s mental health and Men’s Sheds, which create safe spaces for men in their communities.

Andy’s Man Club: A peer-support group founded in memory of Andy Roberts. Now more than 140 clubs across the UK. Free, walk-in, no referrals.

Mind’s Side by Side platform: Online, free, and moderated - a safe space to connect when leaving the house feels impossible.

Local walking football: You’d be shocked how often exercise sneaks in as therapy.

Spaces like these tend to work because they, very importantly, meet men where they are, not where they wish they were. They largely skip out on the clipboards and jargon, and give a miss of the “let’s unpack that” - it’s movement, banter and moments of honesty that sneak up between jokes about farts.

It isn’t complicated, but it is somewhat countercultural. We still tend to think of “care” having to look like softly lit rooms with herbal tea and certificates on the wall when sometime care looks like a walk in the rain with someone who’ll tell you whether you’re being a dickhead and then hand you a sandwich after.

“You’re being a dickhead, Geoff. Eat your sandwich” - Photo by Chris Weiher on Unsplash

There also needs to be an acknowledgement that when we talk about “men” we’re not talking about a monolith - Gay and Trans Men have traditionally had to navigate additional layers of danger and visibility, black men face over policing and under-service while working class men tend to carry every cut first and only ever heal last.

A man who earns six figures who feels lonely in Canary Wharf and a man who’s just lost his job on a building site are both in pain, but for very different reasons and sometimes need different approaches - we can hold both truths without pretending they’re the same story or need the same solution.

“Men’s Mental Health” isn’t one thing in isolation - it’s a tangle of privilege and punishment where the sharp edges are never distributed evenly.

And this is the bit that we sometimes miss when we discuss men’s mental health - the context of it all. You can’t separate mental health from class, money, housing, safety, sexuality, race or the thousand other little invisible pressures that all sit on a person’s shoulders before they even get out of bed in the morning. The fact that we keep generalising “men” into one amorphous lump of beards, farts and bellies who apparently love football, hate emotions and fix things with WD-40 is a large part of the reason why we’re still stuck at awareness and haven’t moved on to access yet.

We’ve been treating mental health like a branding exercise instead of a survival issue, and that I think is what wears me down the most. When I see the broader landscape, all it looks like is the “branding” of wellbeing. And I’m not saying that awareness campaigns aren’t valuable (of course they are, incredibly so), but there’s an increasing hollowness that’s starting to happen to some of it.

Resources:
If you or someone you know is struggling:

- Mind: 0300 123 3393 (mind.org.uk)
- Samaritans: 116 123 — open 24/7
- CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably): 0800 58 58 58 (thecalmzone.net)
- SHOUT Crisis Text Line: Text SHOUT to 85258

Kind of a cheery corporate mindfulness that instead wants to give you the aesthetic of care without the actual hard work of creating it - and it’s become more and more apparent in workplaces. HR departments and Wellness teams hand out lovely “mental health champion” badges during lunchtime wellness and mindfulness sessions - but the moment someone asks for reduced hours or a mental health day, they are absolutely nowhere to be seen.

I don’t believe there’s any malice in it most of the time - there’s just no real muscle either.

Now, I do have to also clarify that I’m not talking just as someone interested in mental health, because I have found myself on both sides of this issue.

Both as a professional who cares very deeply about men having access to mental health and as a man having genuine struggles with my mental health, and specifically around anxiety.

I often experience days where I’m so anxious that I can barely function, where my brain is stuck in that primal loop of fight, flight or freeze - sometimes managing to do all three in one day.

There are moments when I sit in meetings when my chest tightens and my thoughts feel like a room full of televisions all blaring on different channels, during which even the most simple decisions - answering a message, replying to an email - feel like it’s just too much.

And I do cope. Sometimes well. Sometimes terribly.

Lifting things in the gym helps. Writing helps. Going out for what I lovingly call my “stupid fucking mental health walk” sometimes helps.

But sometimes these things don’t help. Sometimes the weights in the gym annoy me, sometimes a walk is just a walk and sometimes the darkness and the pressure still sit on my shoulders no matter what I do.

There are moments when I freeze entirely - when the only thing I can manage is to keep breathing and wait for the surge of anxiety to pass, holding on to the knowledge that it will do so eventually, even if in that moment it feels endless.

This year has been the roughest in my living memory - work has been so hard I struggle to find words to describe some of the moral injury my colleagues and I have had to endure, my dad’s health has been on a constant rollercoaster of decline, panic and improvement, and there are days when it all feels like I’m trying to hold together a dam with my bear hands.

But the truth is, I still consider myself to be lucky - because I’ve been privileged enough to afford additional help on top of what the NHS can offer at the moment. This is not something that everyone has, and I’m painfully aware of it.

The therapy sessions I’ve had - that space, those conversations - have helped to keep me vaguely upright. I can’t overstate just how much of a difference that level of access makes, because when you’re in the thick of it, being heard - really, really heard - can feel like oxygen.

And this is what terrifies me for the people around me - because I know that so many men (and women and teenagers and kids and pensioners) simply cannot afford that lifeline. They’re left to “wait and see.”

We tell people to open up, but we give them nowhere to open up to.

How to Actually Help Someone You Care About

1. Don’t ask “How are you?” - ask twice. The first answer is automatic.

2. When someone opens up, ask what they want from you: your ears (just listen), your brain (help solve), or your boots (show up, go for a walk, make a call).

3. Offer time, not platitudes. “I can talk tonight” means more than “You can always talk to me.”

4. And if you’re the one struggling - tell someone before it gets cinematic. You don’t need to be at rock bottom to ask for a ladder.

That is the quiet epidemic inside the wider one - the exhaustion of men (and everyone else) who are genuinely trying.

Men who do talk. Men who do reach out. Men who make that terrifying first GP appointment and yet still find themselves stuck in a system that will still let them fall through the cracks. And that exhaustion moves from being emotional to becoming structural.

Every demographic out there is being let down in different ways, but all within the same infrastructure. We talk endlessly about resilience, but resilience is not an endless resources - it’s something that runs out after a while, especially when life keeps demanding more than people have left to give.

We keep pretending we’re a country that cares, when we’re really a country that’s more than happy to outsource care - to charities, to friends, to best of “luck and hope you’re alright in the end.”

To move this towards an end point - Movember still matters. It sparks the conversations, raises money and awareness. But we need to turn that awareness into access. Talking is a fantastic start, but it’s not the finish line. It can’t be. Because people - men, women, everyone - are still waiting for help that seems ever slower in coming.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned from this year, it’s that survival comes, quite often, down to the smallest act. The gym session. The text from a friend. The stupid fucking mental health walk. The reminder that tomorrow might be better.

Tomorrow might also be worse - that’s the deal with life, you roll the dice, hope for the best sometimes and keep going.

And if that’s you - if you’re reading this increasingly incoherent rant that started off with moustaches and ended with whatever this is turning into - I would like to say something to you.

You’re not weak. You’re not broken. You’re human in a country that makes it far too hard to be one, and I’m so sorry about that.

But hang on. Breathe. Message your mate. Ask the awkward question. Take the stupid fucking walk.

And for the love of all that’s holy, if you can grow a moustache this month, do it.

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If you’ve made it all the way down here - first of all, thank you. This one was a hard one to write, but an important one too.

This week (3rd to 10th November), I’m offering a small thank-you and a bit of good mischief rolled into one - 20% off annual subscriptions, with 20% of every annual subscription donated straight to Movember.

If you’ve been meaning to support Bearly Politics or were planning to anyway, now’s a damn good time to do it - it keeps this space running, helps me keep writing about the things that matter and this week, it also helps fund vital men’s health support across the UK.

You can use the button below to subscribe and activate the offer.

1. Anyone who is familiar with me knows that I have a very well documented weakness for men in moustaches. Grrrr.

2. “Yes, indeed, my anxiety does make me unable to sleep at night, thank you so much for asking Mr Form.”