The hashtag #doyouevenmentalhealthbro? recently started to appear on social media. A play on the meme “Do You Even Lift, Bro?”, the condescending expression used on fitness forums to question the legitimacy of someone’s routine — “lift”, as in lift weights — it was designed to… what, exactly? Highlight that men need to pay more attention to their mental wellbeing? Chide them for not doing so? Make them think?
Or was it instead emblematic of the next trend in wellness? That after worrying about our sleep, our exercise, our carbs, our calories, our drinking, our snacking, our meat, our vegetables, the provenance of our meat and vegetables, the number of steps we’ve taken in a day, how much time we spend sitting and/or standing and if our iPhones are killing us (probably while we sleep), the next step in mindfulness is our actual minds. And, if so, what does it mean? How do you even “do” mental health anyway?
The issue of mental health has never been more prominent. We’ve seen the headlines that suicide is the number one killer of men under 45 in the UK. We may know too that men report significantly lower life satisfaction than women. That last year the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission described male loneliness as “a silent epidemic”. From adverts on buses urging us to “Ask for help” by texting a number, to celebrities from Princes William and Harry to Stormzy opening up about depression, to the high-profile suicides of chef Anthony Bourdain and the DJ Avicii to plenty of low-profile ones too, fessing up to low moments has shifted up the agenda. The prevailing mood of rap music has moved from braggartry to insecurity: Drake’s lyrics are cries for help, while Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and J Cole have all talked about depression. Mental illness may be dangerously close to becoming a badge of honour: the website bando.com sold out of £40 gold nameplate necklaces with the words “Anxiety” and “Depression” in a hip italic font. Their manufacturer says its intention is to “open a dialogue”.
Of course some stigma still remains. Men are famously terrible at talking about anything emotional. But we can confidently say it’s not like it was in our fathers’ days. And definitely not like it was in our fathers’ fathers’ days.
Concern over mental wellbeing has produced a slightly more palatable term than #DoYouEvenMentalHealthBro? The new buzzword is “vulnerability” and it is everywhere. In 2010, the US academic Brené Brown gave a Ted talk titled “The Power of Vulnerability” that is by turns moving, convincing and syrupy in the language of Californian retreats and Silicon Valley start-ups. Riffing on hiding shame and pain behind façades, Brown contends: “There is another way: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen. To love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee. To practice gratitude and joy… to believe that we’re enough”.
Through its website, podcasts, blogs and YouTube channel, the men’s “media platform” Rebel Wisdom, founded last year by former Channel 4 News film-maker David Fuller and meditation teacher Alexander Beiner, invites men to “get vulnerable”, among other things. Its new age-y literature states: “In today’s world, for men to be vulnerable and speak the truth is an act of rebellion. What if you just told the truth?”
In other words, if you have doubts, worries and agonies, talk about them. Drop the default strong-and-silent mode and rebadge your vulnerabilities as strengths: let them be seen.
Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? And 36m views suggests Brené Brown, for one, is onto something. “One of the problems is that in the last 10 years or so, the world hasn’t really been interested in the psychology of gender,” the psychotherapist Nick Duffell told The Guardian earlier this year. “What we’ve been interested in are transgender issues and free choice and pronouns and gender as a social construct and abuses of power. But one of the things I’ve been working with is how powerless men often feel in the private sphere. Men are very unskilled when it comes to relationships and dealing with their emotions. We need to train them to be better at vulnerability, better at relating — and when they begin to do that, the power they develop is more authentic.”
Admitting vulnerability, relating, being more authentic… it sounds like a positive step forward when presented by authorities at Ted talks, on philosophy-based YouTube channels and by psychotherapists in newspapers. But what does it actually mean? Where do you start?
In fact vulnerability — or #vulnerability — has spawned its own start-up culture. Sanctus in London’s Shoreditch has a mission to “change perceptions of mental health”. If you visit one of its Stories Live events, pitched somewhere between an AA meeting, a group therapy workshop and an open mic night, a phrase you will hear a lot is, “Thanks for being vulnerable”.
I attended a session in the summer, in a studio owned by UsTwo, the video game developer responsible for the hit puzzle-solving smartphone game Monument Valley. It took place in the Tea Building, next to the trendy private club Shoreditch House. There was a bar and comfy seating with chairs arranged facing an improvised stage. The stories I heard covered a range of mental health issues: there were moving testimonials on anxiety and depression, body dysmorphia, addiction, panic attacks, compulsions and obsessions. Participation was encouraged, with members of the audience — 50 or so men and women, with what must have been a median age of 30 — offering good-natured reflections on the torturous, but often tragicomic, stories. It was never gushing or mawkish, nor was it all earnest solemnity — there were laughs, too. People left feeling better, or at least comfortable about having shared the things that made them scared. Show me your tender bits, and I’ll show you mine. But Stories Live is only one element of what Sanctus does.
It also deploys therapists and coaches to go into businesses to build “safe spaces” where employees can open up about their worries. They are particularly popular with London-based tech companies. And business is good: they have a full-time roster of coaches and psychiatrists and a six-figure turnover. This puts them on track for their next ambition, to build the world’s first “mental health gym” on the high street. A sort of Barry’s Bootcamp for the mind.
“The perception of mental health is quite negative,” Sanctus’s founder, 26-year-old James Routledge, tells me. “People instantly think of suicide, stress, depression, anxiety. With physical health the first thing that comes to mind is probably fitness: healthy diets, healthy foods, being toned — all very positive connotations. So our mission is to get people to think about mental health in a much more positive light: being more self-aware, knowing more about yourself, your level of empathy, performance, productivity and creativity.
“The classic statistic,” he says, “is one-in-four people, in any given year, will struggle with a mental health issue. The flipside is three-in four-people will have [good] mental health. It’s about educating that mental health is a spectrum and it oscillates. So let’s focus on it day-to-day, proactively, just like we do with our physical health.”
Advice Sanctus advocates is journalling (writing down feelings), urban flâneuring (going for a walk), meditating and engaging in therapy, one-on-one or in a group. As with other entrepreneurs in this area, Routledge’s enthusiasm comes from personal experience. When the start-up he founded in his early twenties imploded, so did he. He suffered anxiety and panic attacks, and had no idea what was happening to him.
“It took a lot of work and talking to get through to the other side,” he says. “Now I always try and be honest, be open, be vulnerable and say when I’m struggling, or don’t think I’m good enough. Vulnerability is linked with being authentic and being authentic is hard. I was trying to present this image of myself, never being me. That led to a big disconnection and poor mental health.”
Routledge’s comments are problematic. They presuppose that identity and personality are fixed, that there is some essential and authentic “self”. Yet our personalities, moods and views, the ways we present ourselves to others as well as to ourselves, are mutable: we’re a million different people from one day to the next, to paraphrase the old The Verve song lyric. To access that one single “you”, to switch to “being authentic”, is not just hard — it might be impossible.
The notion of an authentic self is especially attractive to a person in psychic pain: looked at one way, the common illnesses of anxiety and depression are maladies in the dysfunctional “I”. But even if it makes sense in the light of Routledge’s mission with Sanctus, the existence of a self is itself under attack: contemporary neuroscience suggests it’s merely a collection of chemical impulses. Buddhism, which advocates self-transcendence, has long held that it amounts to no more than a knot of transitory memories and responses encased in blood and bone.
Setting that aside, Routledge isn’t the first to struggle in the technology business, somewhere that, for all its utopian platitudes (Google: “Don’t be evil”; Facebook: “Bring people closer together”), can be an ultracompetitive and macho environment. Only the Paranoid Survive is the telling title of a 1998 business book by Andrew S Grove, president and CEO of Intel, the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer microchips. And Routledge found his frankness touched a nerve: vulnerability wasn’t just a useful self-development tool, it proved an effective business strategy, too.
If global market researcher Mintel reckons the industry for private health and fitness was worth £3.1bn in the UK in 2017, it’s easy to imagine mental fitness as the natural add-on to gym sessions — getting fit inside as well as out. More difficult to picture is what the psychic equivalent of a rowing machine would be, or what running a psychological 10km would entail. But perhaps that is to misunderstand Sanctus’s “mental health gym”.
In fact, the Stories Live event may be seen as a kind of prototype. “A safe space created between you and the Sanctus coach,” Routledge says. “I see our coaches like personal trainers. There will be group-based stuff, workshops, quiet spaces where people can disconnect, do journalling, meditation, flotation tanks and yoga. The thing we never ever want to lose is the importance of working on your mental health in a community with other humans… feeling like you can trust someone.”
Routledge is well aware that even the word “vulnerable” is problematic. Having a hard time at work may pale in comparison to, for example, the 300,000 people currently homeless in the UK, who are also vulnerable, though less likely to use the word as an Instagramable hashtag.
“I can’t compare feeling a bit worried about what people think to not having somewhere to sleep,” he says. “But I do think the narrative is a problem within mental health. When I was starting to feel anxious and having panic attacks, there was a part of it which didn’t feel like my problems were enough to share. You might not be homeless but it’s dangerous for people to start to think ‘My problems aren’t enough’.”
At another mental health meet-up, I listen to 28-year-old George Adolphus introduce The Smile Tribe, a start-up with a website that talks about “Mind-Fit-Ness”: different grammar but identical semantics. The company’s aim is to enable you to “live a life you love”, and his presentation is on the theme of play: fashioning life into a game as a strategy to combat sadness, among other things.
His talk certainly plays to a receptive audience in a packed auditorium at the headquarters of consumer goods company Unilever near Blackfriars, in London, and organised by the Minds@Work Movement, a network of high-flying corporate employees including leading figures at The Bank Of England, HSBC and the law firms Clifford Chance and Herbert Smith Freehills, all of whom have pledged to destigmatise mental health in the workplace. With companies increasingly employing psychotherapists, offering wellness programmes and free yoga sessions, mental health has climbed the ranks of the workplace agenda. Whether that’s a cynical exercise in shoring up the bottom line (cheery workforces are more productive, and mental illness costs the economy up to £99bn annually) or genuinely well-intentioned is up for debate. What’s indisputable is that many of Minds@Work’s senior executives have had firsthand experience of the terrors of mental illness, either personally or peripherally.
Like Sanctus, The Smile Tribe host talks and workshops, introducing notions like “You are not your thoughts” (a common mindfulness technique that helps people dissociate from anxious rumination), and teaching keys to mental health. “Diet is important, exercise is important, connecting with people and building habits is important,” Adolphus says. It is also developing technologies to help, combining AI with CBT (cognitive-behavioural therapy), with the aim of producing a kind of therapist-bot app to install on smartphones. Adolphus lights up when he begins to talk about what tech can do for mood.
“We need a Fitbit for the mind,” he says. “Something where we can measure progress in the same way that I run round the block and the next day try to run around it faster, and track all that through [running/cycling social network] Strava. People need the same thing with the words and thoughts they’re having.”
A glance at the App Store suggests there’s a busy market for meditation tools (Calm, Headspace), sleep improvers (Sleepio), mental health chat apps (TalkLife, Big White Wall) and mood-tracking utilities (Happy Not Perfect). Indeed, plenty of venture capital and tech talent is being gambled on apps-as-antidepressants, even if the best AI on offer is still a far cry from what makes therapy actually work between two humans: empathic understanding, congruence, and what the psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard” — being kind and listening to someone no matter who or what they are. The Smile Tribe is testing software that responds to users sharing their most intimate thoughts and worries, stuff they may never talk to anyone about. “If we can create this tool that enables people to check-in at any time, I’d see that as really powerful,” he says. “That’s the most heartwarming thing, and it’s why technology will improve things.”
The Smile Tribe isn’t alone in viewing sadness as a solvable problem: “Depression is just sadness for a long time, or sadness, worry or hopelessness you can’t shift,” Adolphus says. “We all have this in some form. I want to attach ourselves to mental health because the moment people hear the word ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ they think, ‘I need to go to the doctor and take medication’. But I don’t think most people need that. The majority just need some lifestyle tools to deal with it.”
Adolphus’s view could be seen as suspect, if not downright incorrect. The NHS website states: “Depression is more than simply feeling unhappy or fed up for a few days. Most people go through periods of feeling down, but when you’re depressed you feel persistently sad for weeks or months. Some people think depression is trivial and not a genuine health condition. They’re wrong — it is a real illness with real symptoms. Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or something you can ‘snap out of’ by ‘pulling yourself together’.”
The Smile Tribe’s philosophy is modelled on Adolphus’s own experiences. As a student at Bristol University he was suffering up to five panic attacks a day. “I was depressed and hiding everything. I had such bad social anxiety that I didn’t want to leave the house, I couldn’t get a job or go to interviews. I stopped seeing my friends.
“I got to the stage where I thought, ‘This isn’t how I want to live my life. I’m either going to give up and kill myself, or do everything I can to live a life I love. So how do I go about doing that?’ The first thing was that I’d be better off telling everyone how I felt, so I spent a day driving round all my friends’ houses. I changed my diet, looked at all the serotonin-inducing foods, balanced my blood sugar, stopped smoking and drinking, just cut it all out. Then I started reading about how you can reframe your thoughts and start seeing the world differently. Really quickly my life got better. I got to this place where I thought, ‘Oh my God, people don’t need to struggle! You can get out of this’. Now I want to shout about it.”
Maybe it worked for Adolphus, but is his view of depression somewhat narrow? It begs other questions, such as: what’s happiness got to do with mental health anyway? Is, say, depression an absence of happiness, or instead the loss of something else: meaning or calmness, for example? And second, recognising that mental illness can range from mild social anxiety to psychotic depression, burnout and suicidal intention, can an app, a gym or a meet-up do something that tried-and-tested clinical interventions can’t?
It’s surely right to be sceptical: emotional life tends to be more nuanced than simple imbalances in happiness and sadness, and the terrain of mental health is infinitely individuated. Its tragic obverse is mental illness which, it’s worth repeating, can be lethal. So how seriously should we take this talk of #vulnerability and mental fitness?
On the one hand, says Dr Ian Drever, a consultant psychiatrist who’s worked in The Priory and delivered talks at Minds@Work events, we should at least give it the time of day. “There’s significant value in realising that we are vulnerable, that we can become ill, that we have needs which we should acknowledge to ourselves. At The Priory, I saw a lot of the stereotypical alpha males in professions like law and banking who tried to soldier on, maintaining an aura of invincibility, only for it later to come crashing down when illness set in. For those guys, having a sense of vulnerability earlier on would have been helpful.”
As for mental fitness, he adds that learning skills can also be useful. “They'll make it easier for us to bat something off if life throws us a challenge, and it means that we can maintain better overall health, a greater sense of objectivity, and have some skills ready to deploy, right when we need them most, rather than waiting for a problem to strike and then seeking treatment — which, of course, can take time, during which the illness may worsen.”
But on whether any of this can be mediated through an app, Drever is wary. “That can never replace the power of seeing a real person,” he says. “And also it's becoming clear that too much time on phones, screens and social media is a huge problem, and can be positively damaging to mental health.” If in doubt, see a doctor.
Another strand of all this is that positive mental health has been adopted by media and organisations peddling yet another take on New Masculinity. In the era of #MeToo and Trump, calls for men to reassess who they are and how they behave has led to handwringing in the media. “There’s a narrative that masculinity is fundamentally toxic,” The Guardian reported. One aim of Rebel Wisdom is to reevaluate what it means to be male, through group yoga sessions, discussion of Jungian archetypes and group hugs.
“Taking our lead from the great psychologist Carl Jung, our experience is that everyone contains both a masculine and feminine side — and that it is only by consciously and deliberately developing both of them that we become fully present and embodied,” its website states. “But this is not the same as gender neutrality, quite the opposite — instead of seeing gender as a ‘spectrum’ — we can see it as two spectrums, an inner masculine and feminine in each of us. Our experience is that men need the support and challenge of other men to develop their masculine side. The kind of accountability, fierce loving energy that men can give each other”.
Unfortunately their biggest success to date has been a series of video interviews with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who advocates self-improvement while rallying against political correctness, who shot to fame via a combative interview with Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman in January — ironically, a former colleague of Rebel Wisdom founder David Fuller — that was notably light on any fierce, loving energy.
There’s a less reconstructed, more time-honoured way for men to confront any problem: attack it with maximum ferocity. And, currently, few people do ferocity better than 37-year-old Tyne and Wear-based Paul Mort and his Unstoppable Bastards project.
I heard Mort speak at the mental health-themed Getahead Festival in London. Among the yoga classes, protein bar stalls, meditation gurus and sober-raving he cut a singular figure: tattooed, garishly-attired and emphatic. His in-your-face Facebook posts and daily motivational emails are similarly energetic. One reads: “Before you get your knickers in a twist (some dude somewhere, WILL) I have a LOT of experience with depression not just through the boatloads of men I’ve coached but with MYSELF. Sh*t, depression quite literally STOLE at least a couple of years of my life”.
However, one of his promotional videos tells a more sober story: Mort is discovered on top of a cliff edge, casting back to the episode when he felt like taking his own life. The accompanying text reads “How a Bipolar Dad on the Verge of Suicide Took Back Control of His Life, Transformed His Business, Saved His Marriage and Became Unstoppable”. Self-doubting blokes show up to his events and leave transformed into postmodern warrior-monks, or so the social media posts suggest.
Mort offers coaching, online seminars and immersive programmes (which include workouts, meditation and men fighting each other on the beach) designed to build “Unstoppability”: his own brand of mental fitness. That encompasses five key areas: focus (your mindset), fitness (energy, body shape, health), family (relationships), finance (money, business, lifestyle) and fun.
Fun? “Interestingly enough,” Mort says, “that’s the area where people have the most problems when they come in. They don’t know what to do for fun that isn’t destructive.”
“Unstoppable is just a guy who isn’t perfect, isn’t a superhero, but understands how to deal with everyday stress, events, triggers, circumstances,” he says. “I say to the guys ‘Listen: those things aren’t going away. But you can just get better at dealing with them — an expanded capacity to deal with stress’. It’s sometimes the problem for most men that we think we’re going to get to this perfect life. But that life doesn’t exist.”
Mort has built a fanbase through ferocious, often comic honesty about his mental illness ordeals. Doctors had prescribed lithium (common for bipolar disorder) but, he says, “it was horrendous. It stopped the highs, the mania, but I just felt like shit all the time. And then I actually made some lifestyle changes.”
In Mort’s mind, there is no crisis of masculinity apart from the fact men don’t know how to ask for help if they’re suffering. “Work hard, play hard — it's always been the same, we're just at a point where the stress is a bit higher.”
“My opinion — and this upsets some people — is that depression, anxiety and stress are all just a state. And you can manage that state,” he adds. “You can stay on top of it, but you can also change it quite quickly. That sounds quite harsh, but it’s the truth. It’s just a case of having the right tools, and staying on top of it.”
And the trick to all this? We’re back to #vulnerability. “I’ve had death threats and a lot of shit thrown my way for being open because men who aren’t open will get triggered by me being open. The great thing about vulnerability is it’s a starting point: you can’t really make a change until you're radically honest.
“The basic problem in all of this,” Mort concludes, “is that a lot of men see asking for help as a sign of weakness. Listen: men don't even read fucking instructions. Get something from Ikea and you've turned a cupboard into a table. It’s ’cos you didn't read the instructions. Read the fucking instructions!”
The irony is that when navigating the psychic topography of vulnerability, there are plenty of prescriptions but very few instructions. There is no clear path or model, partly because there’s no “masculinity”, only millions of men, each with their own idiosyncrasies, questions and pathologies. Meanwhile, the ambiguities can be anxiety-inducing enough in themselves. So what to do about it all? Maybe we just all need to calm the hell down.
If we’re to get philosophical here, bear in mind also what the stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said around 2,000 years ago: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be,” he wrote in Meditations. “Be one.”
Stoicism itself is one of the most effective therapies for depression (life is hard and tragic: deal with it) and philosophy may indeed be our best reader for the latest chapter in the How to Be a Man story.
One clue to the success of James Routledge’s Sanctus programme is how well it fits in with other contemporary lifestyle pursuits: habits such as mindfulness, meditation, veganism, yoga, practising gratitude and journalling which come badged “wellness” or “wellbeing” but all of which have their roots in religious practice. Even Sanctus’s name sounds devout, so perhaps a secular-spiritual method of dealing with modern torment is the wisest of all paths. Wasn’t it Jung who said that religions were “the world’s great psychotherapeutic systems”?
The other side of faith is doubt, and what’s most convincing and plausible about Routledge’s vision is that he readily admits he doesn’t claim to have all answers on how to “do” mental health, mental fitness or #vulnerability. He doesn’t see the Californian creed of constant self-betterment as the panacea, nor believe that technology alone will save us.
“We can't be overly positive and like, ‘Woo, it’s all good,’” he says. “Because that's not the case for some people. In the very early days of Sanctus, I probably still wanted it to be about being better, and how you can have better mental health. The more work I did in group sessions and one-on-ones, the more I learned about acceptance. If, as a brand, you're always telling people ways they can be better, then you're telling them they need to be better: you're telling them they're not good enough. That isn’t a message we want to send.”
It remains to be seen if any of the businesses riding the current vogue for mental health will create a measurable difference in the stock of human wellbeing: a reduction in suicide rates, for instance. There’s little to criticise in having a go at it. But it’s safe to say that while trends and technologies come and go, the human need for contact, fellowship and understanding endures.
Perhaps a better analogy of what Sanctus is, and will be, is like a church. “When I look at what a church is like,” Routledge says, “we're supposed to be this in essence: community, the confession box, confidants, structure. That's probably more what the Sanctus gym would look like.”
Today, it’s a genuinely radical idea. As it is written, love thy neighbour as thyself, in all thy vulnerability. Maybe it won’t make you happy. But it might just keep you sane.
