A new study published in Heliyon explores how traditional gender norms and expectations for masculinity shape men’s mental health and increase their risk of suicidality. Researchers led by Lisa Eggenberger at the University of Zurich found that men who conform to rigid masculine ideals—particularly those emphasizing emotional control, self-reliance, and dominance—are significantly more vulnerable to depression and suicidal thoughts.
While research has long suggested that gender norms influence mental health, this study takes a deeper look at how specific masculine beliefs create barriers to help-seeking and drive men toward crisis. Given that men are 2.3 times more likely to die by suicide than women, understanding the role of masculinity in suicidality is critical.
“The interplay between the conformity to masculine norms dimensions—restrictive emotionality, self-reliance, and willingness to engage in risky behavior—paired with suicidal beliefs about the unbearability of emotional pain, may create a suicidogenic psychosocial system,” the researchers write.
Rather than attributing men’s higher suicide rates to individual pathology or biological vulnerability, the findings underscore how dominant masculine norms—shaped by historical, economic, and culturall forces—actively constrain emotional expression, discourage help-seeking, and create a psychosocial landscape where distress is internalized, somaticized, or externalized through risk-taking and aggression. The research points to the need for interventions that move beyond symptom management and instead challenge the cultural and institutional structures that sustain harmful masculinities and calls for a more socially and politically engaged understanding of psychological distress and suicide prevention.
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NEWS FLASH: It is clear from events in the United States that feminists are in the process of taking over the whole world, and intend to abduct and incarcerate all men of child baring age into seaman milking farms, and euthanize all future male progeny in order to eventually eliminate the male side of the human species. Then, having eliminated the male side, there will no longer be any female side because female only exists in contrast to the male, so they’ll be genderless, a new species and eventually learn to reproduce by asexual reproduction. We do not yet know if this will be by releasing spores or by dividing into two. We must resist! We need armies of men, kind of jihadist like, to subvert all the feminists by developing their sex appeal as a new offensive weapon. So it’ll be a bloodless war, without bullets or bloodshed, although there may be a few used condoms lying around.
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As a female, I must say I am embarrassed this was written by a female psychologist. Especially since, no psychologists should be trying to increase their business, until they have something more than gaslighting and force drugging their clients with neurotoxins, to offer their clients.
Learn to live and let live, scientifically “invalid” psychological and psychiatric industries.
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