Talking, opening up to another person, telling someone how you feel: these are some of the most freeing actions in which a human being can engage. The question is, why are so many of us so uncomfortable about doing these things? Why is it that so many of us choose to allow anxieties, fears and anger to bubble away under the surface of the neat, well-ordered veneers that we present to the outside world from day to day?
These are but a couple of the questions to which I sought answers in my discussion with second-year Trinity student Niamh Barry. Thankfully, for those of you not lucky enough to get the chance to sit down and speak at length with Barry about these issues, she has made an excellent and thoughtful documentary on male mental health in the hope of starting these types of conversations on a much more regular basis. Entitled “Boys Actually Do Cry” (which she quickly assures me is not an allusion to the famous Cure song “Boys Don’t Cry”), Barry’s documentary features candid, courageous testimonies from young male interview participants, many of them are Trinity students, who have all had experience in suffering from mental health difficulties.
When I ask Barry about what compelled her to make this documentary, she talks eloquently about the social stigma and lack of acceptance that exists surrounding the topic of male mental health. “I think that both men and women are on the same emotional level. However, I think that the differences in how we express our emotions as genders come down to what we deem to be socially acceptable. This is something I was hoping to reflect in the documentary by highlighting the fact that “lad culture” and toxic masculinity has led to a situation where men feel less able to express their emotions than women.” Barry is not alone in saying this.
It is a story corroborated by many of the young men who agreed to take part in her documentary. Throughout the film, a number of them bravely reveal the personal hardships they have experienced in coming to terms with who they are as men, all the while being derided by a masculine ideal to which they could never conform.
Barry lays the blame for this phenomenon at the feet of the excesses of masculinity itself as a social construct. She claims that what she learned through making the documentary, above all else, is that “it’s so important that an atmosphere in which men feel comfortable to open up about their emotions is created. I’ve learned from making the documentary that it really is crucial that men take each other seriously when they speak up about their feelings and emotions. This atmosphere needs to be fostered, so that male mental health is no longer a taboo subject”.
One of the most significant aspects of Barry’s documentary is the inclusion of a representative from the transgender community, Nathan O’Gara. O’Gara’s story poignantly nails the stark message that society urgently needs to catch up with the times so as not to fail and neglect future generations of transgender people.
Barry laments the fact that adequate services to help members of the trans community are not available from an early age in our secondary schools. She says she “really wanted it to hit home how sad it is that these people were never really able to reach out and seek help in their secondary schools. I hope that by the end of the documentary, the film had really gotten it across that we need to do something about this now and not ignore the problems that people have. This is something that needs to be tackled by our secondary schools. If we have sex education talks and talks about all these other sorts of things, then it’s time we started having real talk about mental health in our secondary schools. Rather than just getting a surface understanding of what is affecting people’s mental health, we need to start getting underneath”.
Despite the adversity that so many continue to face, Barry ends the interview on an optimistic note by claiming that things are definitely improving and that people’s attitudes are changing for the better.
There is no doubting the importance of the work done by charitable organisations to alleviate the struggles faced by those suffering with mental health issues. However, it is also time that we stopped outsourcing kindness and empathy to a Samaritans helpline and became Samaritans in our own small way, in our own sphere of influence. As Barry says, “it’s so important that we check in on one another and take each other’s emotions more seriously”. Her documentary is already going a long way to ensuring we start to do exactly that.
