Men Minds. Young men's mental health in transition.

Description

Young men are less likely to seek help for a range of mental health issues (Clark et al., 2020; Burke et al., 2022), and this is often implicated in increasingly poor mental health outcomes for young men, which include substance misuse (Holloway and Bennett, 2018) and suicide (Rodway et al., 2020).  Young men also remain under-represented in mental health research (Ellis et al., 2014; Sheikh et al., 2024) which means that their experiences are less likely to inform both mental health knowledge and practice.  

The Men Minds Project aimed to address this, by working with around 10 young men (the Young People’s Forum) to coproduce a research project for other young men. The project focuses on three groups of adolescent young men whose life experiences and frequently marginalised status means that they are more likely to have faced challenges to their mental health, while facing additional barriers to participating in mental health research or accessing supports (those who identify as: LGBTQI+; in conflict with the law; or asylum seekers, refugees or migrants).  

Drawing upon around 80 hours of sessions with the Young People’s Forum, and on a range of peer-led interviews and focus groups, this paper offers an intersectional analysis of the individual, relational, institutional, cultural and structural factors that affect young men’s mental health.  Furthermore, the paper will highlight the ongoing transitions in young men’s lives (between childhood and adulthood, between cultures, between traditional and more contemporary notions of masculinity) and how this liminality interfaces with mental health. 

Period	25 Apr 2025
Event title	British Sociological Association Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	ManchesterShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International