Young Men and Mental Health: The Cost of Suffering in Silence
Do we teach them that emotions are safe and feelings are normal?
Some of the strongest people I have ever known were also the most silent about their pain, especially the young men. I’m 35 years old, and our society has come such a long way in how we view mental health in the last 20 years. I distinctly remember being 16 years old and struggling with heavy emotions, anxiety, depression, distractibility, and difficulty with relationships. I had ADHD, although I didn’t know it at the time. Thankfully, my mom noticed something was wrong and got me in to see a therapist. But even then, in 2006, there was stigma. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know I was “in therapy,” even though I desperately needed it.
I’ve been seeing a therapist on and off ever since. I find it incredibly helpful. Through every phase of my life, and through every challenge and transition, therapy has given me a place to process, release, learn coping strategies, and feel safe enough to talk. Even now, as a full-time working mom of two young kids, I almost talked myself out of it. I told my therapist I wasn’t sure I needed to keep coming, that I was feeling pretty good, that life was just busy. Her response? “Let’s look at your schedule together and see how we can adjust our times and frequency so you can continue. You have a lot on your plate, and I think being a parent alone is enough for someone to benefit from therapy.”
Young Men and Mental Health
She was right. Within ten minutes of that session, I was in tears, pouring out mom-guilt and fears about whether I was getting it right with my kids. I needed that session. I am grateful for my therapist. I’m grateful to my parents for recognizing what I needed when I was sixteen. And I’m grateful for the privilege of consistently accessing this resource. But as I’ve moved through life benefiting from that support, I’ve noticed something. While I was getting help, many of the people around me, particularly the young men, were not.
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and I want to speak anecdotally about a pattern I’ve watched unfold over the past 20 years. Adolescent, young adult, and adult men are not accessing mental health care nearly enough. I can name several men in my life, men I grew up around, including my husband, who I’ve known since we were 15, who suffered in silence for years. They struggled with anger, depression, anxiety, and substance use, and never received any services. These men weren’t willing to ask or didn’t know where or who to turn to for help.
The numbers confirm what I’ve seen up close. Among young adults ages 18 to 25 with depression, young men have the lowest therapy use of any group, at only 27%, a 22-percentage-point gap compared to women the same age.
The Cost of Suffering in Silence: Young Men and Suicide
A large systematic review of over 96,000 participants found that young women are more than twice as likely to seek mental health services as young men. And of the estimated 18.6 million Americans who experience near-daily depression or anxiety, millions have never once spoken to a healthcare provider about it. Limited access to treatment is not a small problem; it is a crisis hiding in plain sight.
Over the course of three years in my late twenties (2018-2021), I lost three people in my life to suicide. They were all full of life, outgoing, funny, warm-hearted, and deeply caring. All three of them were men between the ages of 21 and 26. They were family members and close friends. Around the same time, my husband and I had one of our closest friends living with us for a few months. We watched him silently fight depression day after day. It was brutal, and we felt completely helpless.
The wreckage that suicide leaves behind is devastating. These men left mothers, fathers, grandmothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, daughters, and countless friends. It was heartbreaking not only to experience those losses myself but to witness everyone around me work through the pain, confusion, and anger.
The statistics give weight to what I lived through. Suicide-related deaths in 2024 were four times higher among males than females, 38,977 men compared to 9,847 women. The male suicide rate was 22.2 per 100,000, compared to 5.6 for females. In fact, the male suicide rate has consistently been three to four times higher than the female rate for the past two decades. Among young adults specifically, the rate for those ages 18 to 27 increased nearly 20% between 2014 and 2024. In 2023, women were also more than twice as likely as men to be taking prescription medication for depression, 15.3% of women compared to just 7.4% of men.
What Are We Doing Wrong?
I am the COO of Sanford Behavioral Health. And I keep asking myself: How do we stop this? Why are these guys struggling so much? How do we get ahead of it? What does prevention and early intervention actually look like for young men? We’re doing something wrong. Something is missing.
I know it starts early, in how we raise young boys. Do we teach them that emotions are safe and feelings are normal? That it’s okay to cry, okay to say I’m not okay. But I’m not sure that’s enough on its own. I’ve talked to my husband about his experience growing up in the culture of “man up,” “you’re fine,” “boys don’t cry.” Even now, when things get hard or he’s feeling a lot, it takes conscious effort for him not to shut down completely and suffer in silence. It hurts me to think about the men I lost, men who buried their pain deeper and deeper, who got worse and worse while the weight compounded. They had people in their lives who wanted to help. People who tried. But by the time the severity of their illness was visible to the rest of us, it felt too late.
We’ve made significant progress in the fight against mental health stigma. But there remains a specific, urgent need for more focused support for boys, young men, and adult men. Each one of the men I lost struggled with their mental health. Each one struggled with substances. And not a single one of them felt like it was okay to ask for help.
Sanford Behavioral Health
Brené Brown, a researcher who has spent decades studying human connection, describes shame as the fear that if people truly know us, they will decide we are unworthy of belonging. That fear lives loudly in so many men who have been told their whole lives to push it down and keep moving. At Sanford Behavioral Health, we have the great privilege and responsibility of caring for men who have decided to fight back against that voice. Many of them carry stories that sound achingly familiar to the ones I’ve shared here.
As clients move through treatment, they are encouraged to be open and vulnerable with their peers, their care team, and their families. Slowly, that openness becomes a bridge. They make connections. Relationships begin to repair. Self-worth, long buried, starts to rebuild. The men who walk through Sanford’s doors are among the bravest people I know, and I am proud of every one of them who takes that first step. Our mission at Sanford is to reach young men earlier, before the weight becomes unbearable. We work to improve access to mental health care for young adult males and reduce the barriers that keep them from walking through the door with easy admissions processes.
Sanford COO Katie Vokes says, “I have the privilege of raising a boy.”
Raising a Boy
I have the privilege of raising a boy. He’s only four years old, but I know how important it is, even at this age, to help him identify his feelings, build coping skills, and understand that emotions are not something to be ashamed of. It’s my job as his mother to make sure he has the safety and support to face whatever mental health challenges he may one day encounter. I will not let him struggle through it alone.
On a broader scale, I know one thing that helps: talking about it. Talk about it with your family, your friends, your coworkers, the stranger in the grocery store line. The more we normalize conversations about mental health, the more the stigma erodes, and the more space we create for the men in our lives to say finally, I need help. As a mental health professional, this matters deeply to me. If you are a man reading this article and you are struggling, I want you to hear this clearly: telling someone is not a weakness. It is the hardest and bravest thing you can do. Call someone. Text someone. Text 988 right now if you need to. The people in your life need you here.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Sources
- American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (2026). Suicide statistics. Retrieved from https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/ — citing CDC Fatal Injury Data, 2024.
- CDC National Center for Health Statistics. (2025). Changes in suicide rates in the United States from 2022 to 2023. NCHS Data Brief No. 541. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db541.htm
- Axios / Stateline. (2025, October 7). Young adult suicide rates are rising almost nationwide. Retrieved from https://www.axios.com/2025/10/07/young-adult-suicide-rate-map — citing CDC WISQARS data, 2014–2024.
- American Journal of Psychotherapy. (2026). Gender and age differences in psychotherapy use among US adults with depression and anxiety. Retrieved from https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20250050 — based on 2021–2023 NHANES data.
- NIH / medRxiv. (2025). Young males in crisis: Pathways, usage, and acceptability of an online messenger-based psychosocial counseling service. Retrieved from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.04.25339230 — citing a systematic review of 96,297 participants on help-seeking behavior in young adults.
- CDC National Center for Health Statistics. (2025). Characteristics of adults age 18 and older who took prescription medication for depression: United States, 2023. NCHS Data Brief No. 528. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db528.htm
- NIH / JMIR Mental Health. (2024). Population estimates of self-reported depression and anxiety in the US from a national survey. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12017603/
