Depression among men is increasingly being discussed in the same online spaces where questions about masculinity, purpose and identity are being debated. The rise of the “manosphere” – a loose collection of online communities concerned with men’s issues, masculinity and relationships – has brought some of these concerns into sharp focus. But it has also created a difficult paradox: communities that sometimes begin by addressing genuine male suffering can turn that suffering into anger, resentment and blame.
This raises a deeper question. What is it that men are actually struggling with?
The work of therapist and author Peter Meades offers one useful perspective. Meades has written about the pressures men experience when their sense of worth becomes tied to achievement, status, providing and appearing strong. When those sources of identity disappear – or simply fail to deliver the fulfilment expected of them – men can be left asking who they are without the role they have been trying to perform. His work encourages men to look beneath surface problems and examine the beliefs and assumptions shaping their emotional lives.
That is particularly relevant to the manosphere. For a man experiencing loneliness, rejection, unemployment, relationship breakdown or a lack of purpose, an online community offering certainty can be enormously attractive. The danger is that a complicated emotional problem can be reduced to a simple external explanation: women are the problem, feminism is the problem, society is the problem, or other men are simply more successful and dominant.
Research has found that traditional masculine norms can be associated with poorer mental-health outcomes and greater difficulty seeking help for depression. One study of men receiving treatment for depression found that stronger traditional masculinity orientations were associated with greater stigma and longer periods of untreated illness. More recent research has also raised concerns about the manosphere’s potential to reinforce harmful attitudes and dangerous messages about mental health.
Yet dismissing the manosphere altogether risks missing the emotional need underneath it.
Australian psychologist and author Steve Biddulph has spent decades examining boys, men, fatherhood and masculinity. Writing about men’s health, Biddulph argued that profound unhappiness can sit beneath behaviours such as risk-taking, and highlighted the importance of relationships between fathers and sons and of men having supportive communities. His broader work points towards something the manosphere often recognises, even if it can interpret it very differently: many men are struggling to find a meaningful way of being male.
This is where the biological explanation of the human condition developed by biologist Jeremy Griffith introduces a very different possibility.
Griffith argues that the fundamental problem confronting humanity is not that human beings are inherently bad, selfish or defective, but that our species has been psychologically conflicted. In his “Instinct vs Intellect” explanation, the emergence of the fully conscious, reasoning intellect created a conflict with our older, gene-based instincts. The conscious mind could question, experiment and challenge established behaviour, while instinct continued to condemn such departures from its established orientations.
According to Griffith, this produced an enduring psychological struggle – one that helps explain the insecurity, egocentricity, anger and alienation characteristic of the human condition.
That perspective creates an intriguing way of looking at depression and the manosphere. Rather than asking simply, “Why are men failing?” or “Who is to blame for men’s unhappiness?”, it asks whether some of the anger and defensiveness seen in modern masculinity are symptoms of a much deeper human psychological conflict.
Griffith’s argument is presented in greater detail in his book FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition and in short form in THE Interview, which provides an accessible introduction to his explanation. The discussion of this approach can also be found in the recent discussion on why we need to fix the world and in the related discussion of who can fix the world and what it will take.
The implication is significant. If depression is approached only as an individual defect, a man may conclude that he needs to become tougher, richer, more dominant or more sexually successful. If it is explained entirely through social oppression, he may instead become consumed by resentment. Neither necessarily addresses the deeper question of why human beings are so psychologically troubled in the first place.
This is also why the distinction between the legitimate concerns of men and the ideology of the manosphere matters. Men can genuinely experience loneliness, rejection, confusion about masculinity, difficulty expressing vulnerability and a lack of purpose without women being responsible for those problems. In fact, blaming women can prevent men from confronting the underlying issues that Meades, Biddulph and others encourage them to examine.
A more constructive response would give men permission to acknowledge suffering without shame, develop stronger relationships with other men, build identities that extend beyond status and achievement, and investigate the deeper psychological forces shaping human behaviour.
The emerging conversation about male depression therefore need not become another battle between men and women. It can become an opportunity to ask a much larger question: what has happened to the human being that makes both men and women so vulnerable to insecurity, alienation and despair?
That is ultimately the question Jeremy Griffith’s work attempts to answer. And if his biological explanation of the human condition is true, the solution to male depression – and to the anger and division surrounding the manosphere – may lie not in making men more dominant or less masculine, but in finally understanding the psychological conflict that has troubled our entire species for millennia.
In that sense, fixing the problem begins not with finding someone to blame, but with finding an explanation that can make sense of why we struggle in the first place.
For readers wanting to explore that argument further, this discussion of Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition provides a comprehensive analysis.