Men’s mental health key

For some people, the word brings to mind controversial influencers, hyper-masculine podcasts, and endless online arguments about gender. Others dismiss it as a gathering place for disgruntled and bitter men. Either way, its influence raises an important question: why are so many young men drawn to it?

Part of the answer is that many conversations about mental health simply do not feel like they were built with men in mind. Men are told to open up, but often struggle to find places where they feel safe doing so.

They are encouraged to be vulnerable, yet vulnerability is still met with discomfort, suspicion, or ridicule. The message is often clear enough in theory and far less clear in practice.

That is where the manosphere finds its audience. Many men arrive there carrying questions they have not found answers to elsewhere. Why do I feel lost? Why am I lonely? Why does it seem that nobody notices my struggles unless I am succeeding?

In Kenya, those questions are shaped by real pressures. Young men are coming of age in an economy where jobs are difficult to find and the cost of living keeps rising.

The traditional markers of adulthood–steady work, financial independence, marriage, owning a home–feel further away today than they did for previous generations. Yet expectations have barely changed.

Men are still expected to provide, lead, and keep going no matter what. For many men, the phone rings only when someone needs something, a solution. Few calls begin with a simple and genuine: "How are you doing?"

The writer is a psychologist, and a program officer at Youth Advocacy Africa (YAA).

The appeal of the manosphere is that it often starts with identification of real problems. Male loneliness. Boys struggling in school. Economic uncertainty. The fact that men account for a disproportionately high number of suicides. Which are genuine concerns. The trouble is that recognizing a problem is not the same as solving it.

Some corners of the manosphere take pain and turn it into resentment. They teach men to see relationships as battles, women as opponents, and vulnerability as a weakness. They offer cosmetic answers to complicated problems.

They promise certainty in a world that rarely provides it. And for men who are hurting, anger can begin to feel like a solution when it is really just another form of suffering.

The consequences are not hard to see. Many men wrestle with depression and anxiety in silence. Some disappear into alcohol, drugs, work, or emotional withdrawal. Some make destructive choices. Others die prematurely without ever getting the help they need.

The very existence of the manosphere tells us something important: many men are actively searching for guidance, belonging, and meaning. And the answer is not merely to tell men to speak. It is to create families, friendships, workplaces, and communities that genuinely listen.

This Men's Mental Health Awareness Month, we should aim for more than slogans and symbolic gestures. Men do not need ridicule disguised as toughness.

They need community, purpose, mentorship, friendship, and support. They need room to talk about failure, rejection, loneliness, grief, and uncertainty without being shamed for it. Boys need role models who show that strength is not the absence of emotion but the ability to face it honestly. Above all, men need the freedom to be human.

The future of men's mental health may well depend on whether we can learn to value men not only for what they provide, solve, or endure, but for who they are.

Eric Karuti is a psychologist and a program officer at Youth Advocacy Africa (YAA)