Are Women Responsible for Men’s Mental Health Issues?

Masculinity has been stripped from young boys by the mummy martyrs of the world, mothers who over protect their young boys and who are raising boys alone.

There is something innately powerful about becoming a mother.
It changes you in ways no one can prepare you for.
Not language. Not logic. Not experience.

Shortly after my second son was born six weeks early, I drove with both boys in the back of the car. At the time, my marriage was already cracking in ways I could not yet name. Those cracks would later end an eighteen‑year relationship.

In that moment, I tried to calculate how fast I would need to drive to crash the car in a way that would kill me but spare them.

Words have always been my strength. Numbers have not.
I could not find an equation that worked.

Then a sentence cut through the fog:
You may not hurt them physically, but your actions will hurt them emotionally and mentally for years to come.

That sentence saved my life.

Dark Thoughts, Motherhood, and Male Suicide

Over the years, dark thoughts returned at different points. Later, while working on the anthology Alive to Thrive: Life After Attempting Suicide with therapist and lead author Debbie Debonair, I encountered research on male suicide rates.

My heart broke.

I asked myself a question no mother wants to ask:
Would my sons become part of those statistics?

That fear intensified for my eldest son, who endured severe bullying because of his ethnicity and nationality. This happened in British schools and international schools while we lived overseas.

As I explored men’s mental health more deeply, often over endless cups of tea with Alice and The Caterpillar, the scale of the crisis became impossible to ignore.

The numbers shocked me.
The explanations lacked clarity.
The silence felt dangerous.

How Society Has Confused Masculinity

When I zoomed out and examined the last hundred years, a pattern emerged.

Men have been forced into impossible contradictions.

Masculinity has been diluted, mocked, and misunderstood. Over‑protection, absent fathers, and social shaming have stripped young boys of healthy masculine identity.

Men who express strength face criticism.
Men who express vulnerability face ridicule.
Men who show tenderness in relationships face praise, until that same tenderness appears during personal crisis.

Then it becomes weakness.

As women, we often send conflicting messages.

We want men to show emotion, but not too much.
We want them attractive, but not too attractive.
We want leadership, but not dominance.
We want provision, but not control.
We want equality, but not difference.

We ask men to be present fathers, then criticise how they parent.
We want male role models, yet distrust men in caregiving roles.
We want protection, but not chivalry.
We want men to speak up, but not explain.

This contradiction fractures identity.

Strength for Women, Silence for Men

We expect men to hold us when we break.
We expect them to carry our pain.

Yet when men break, we often tell them to toughen up.
We still use phrases that equate femininity with weakness.

We ask men to honour our sovereignty while reacting harshly when they claim their own.

In the pursuit of equality, we confused “equal” with “the same.”
They are not the same thing.

Men and women are different by design. Biology alone proves that. Difference does not mean hierarchy. It means balance.

Instead of erasing difference, we must honour it.