By Olukorede Yishau
VERY FEW people, I suspect, know that there is a month globally set aside for men’s mental health awareness. I will not be surprised if someone reads this and wonders why a month has to be set aside for an issue like this.
Perhaps some pictures will help put the matter in proper perspective: Somewhere in Lagos a man is laughing loudly in a beer parlour while his world quietly collapses. Another in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, is posting motivational quotes every morning while battling sleepless nights and panic attacks.
In Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, there is a man who has not cried in years because our society taught him early that tears are a luxury men cannot afford.
And in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, a man is sitting in his car long after arriving home because the steering wheel is the only thing listening to him.
Elsewhere in Houston, a Nigerian man, who relocated after years of unmet expectations at home, is driving Uber for hours daily, sending money home to siblings, parents, cousins, in-laws and church projects, while silently wondering if anyone would notice if he disappeared for one week.
The long and short of this is that from left, right and centre, a Nigerian man is carrying pain like a sacred burden. But, the tragedy is not merely that Nigerian men are hurting, the tragedy is that many of them do not even possess the language to describe their pain.
A Nigerian man can identify engine problems in a faulty generator quicker than he can identify depression within himself. He can discuss football tactics for three hours and still lack the vocabulary to say, “I am overwhelmed.”
That is the condition of many men among us. We were raised to become providers but got little or no lesson on how to become human beings.
From childhood, the Nigerian boy is enrolled in the brutal academy of emotional suppression. He falls down and cries. Somebody says, “You are a man. Stop crying.”
“He loses something precious and he is told: “Be strong.” He is afraid and all he hears is: “Men are not cowards.” He struggles and he is told: “Others have survived worse.”
Slowly, he learns that masculinity in our society is not about emotional health but about endurance.
The Nigerian man is expected to absorb pain the way the earth absorbs rainfall, silently and without complaint. So, many men wear emotional masks so convincingly that even those closest to them cannot see the fractures beneath the skin.
The man smiling at the wedding may be drowning in debt, the one spraying money at the party may be contemplating suicide and the loudest man in the room may be the loneliest.
We often speak about the economy in terms of inflation, exchange rates and unemployment figures. But we rarely discuss the psychological consequences of living inside permanent instability.
This raises posers: What does it do to a man’s mind when survival becomes a daily occupation? What happens when a father wakes every morning calculating school fees, rent, electricity bills, fuel prices and medical expenses before even calculating his own emotional survival?
The truth is: Nigerian man is under siege. The society tells him his worth is measured by provision and if he cannot provide, he feels diminished and if he struggles financially, shame arrives before sympathy.
In many African societies, a man without money becomes socially invisible.
That pressure is crushing many men quietly and some respond by withdrawing into themselves. Others bury themselves in work, some disappear into alcohol and some others become angry at everything because anger is the only socially acceptable emotion available to men.
Now, we see hostile men. And naturally many Nigerian men are not hostile. They are just emotionally constipated and years of suppressed grief eventually ferment into rage. Sadly, the society keeps demanding silence from them.
Another sad part of the whole saga, when women speak about emotional exhaustion, support often emerges, but when men speak, they are mostly not just mocked, they are told to “man up,” as though masculinity is a treatment plan.
Even religion sometimes worsens the burden. A struggling man is advised to pray harder instead of seeking professional help. In such a situation, depression becomes spiritual weakness and anxiety becomes insufficient faith. So the man continues carrying darkness inside him while smiling publicly.
Our society has normalised male suffering so thoroughly that a tired man is now considered a responsible man, the exhausted father is praised, the overworked husband is admired and the emotionally unavailable man is described as disciplined. With this state of things, almost nobody asks whether he is okay or not.
From my observations, one of the saddest sights in modern society is the ageing Nigerian man who spent his entire life providing for others but never learnt how to process loneliness, disappointment or emotional pain.
I have since concluded that many men from older generations are emotional refugees, they survived life but never truly lived it.
And now younger men are inheriting the same silence. Social media has worsened the crisis in curious ways. Everywhere the Nigerian man turns, somebody appears richer, happier, more successful and more fulfilled.
One man is buying a third house in Lekki, another is vacationing in Santorini and another is showing off luxury watches and more.
Comparison has become a national disease and many young men now measure their value through visible success and if they are not “making it,” they feel defective.
Sincerely, what social media rarely shows is the anxiety behind some smiles, the insomnia behind some achievements and the emotional emptiness behind some lifestyles.
The modern Nigerian man is exhausted from performing strength, but perhaps the greatest tragedy is loneliness. It is a silent epidemic.
Though many men have friends they drink with but nobody they can truly speak with; many marriages contain companionship without emotional intimacy; and many men are surrounded by people yet emotionally abandoned.
Some cannot even tell their closest friends they are struggling because vulnerability among men is often treated as weakness or entertainment material for future mockery. So they suffer privately.
When a man loses his job, he tells nobody; when another battles addiction, he does secretly; when another is consumed by panic attacks, he sits in darkness wondering whether life still has meaning.
And because he continues going to work, greeting neighbours and posting online, everybody assumes he is fine. Until it shows clearly that it is not fine.
The alarming rise in suicide cases among men should disturb us deeply. Data compiled from WHO-linked mortality estimates show that in 2015 alone, 12,618 Nigerian men died by suicide compared to 5,477 women, translating to suicide rates of 13.12 per 100,000 for men and 5.79 for women, more than double the female rate.
Peer-reviewed studies reported suicide incidents between 2016 and 2019 revealing that 77.4 percent of victims were male, most of them between the ages of 18 and 29.
Researchers attribute the crisis to a combination of economic hardship, unemployment, social pressure, conflict exposure, emotional isolation, and cultural expectations that discourage men from seeking help, while stigma and weak reporting systems continue to mask the true scale of the problem.
Behind many of those deaths are untreated depression, financial pressure, emotional isolation and years of accumulated hopelessness.
But even suicide is often discussed in whispers, hidden beneath shame and silence. A society that refuses to allow men express vulnerability should not be surprised when many eventually collapse under invisible weight.
I need to add a couple facts: To care about men’s mental health is not to compete with women’s struggles; pain is not an Olympic event and compassion is not a limited natural resource and a healthy society requires emotionally healthy men; children need fathers who can communicate affection without embarrassment; women need partners capable of emotional openness rather than bottled-up frustration, and communities need men who understand that strength and vulnerability can coexist.
My final take: The conversation around men’s mental health must move beyond slogans and social media hashtags and perhaps most importantly, men themselves must begin unlearning generations of inherited emotional repression.
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The conversation around men’s mental health must move beyond slogans and social media hashtags and perhaps most importantly, men themselves must begin unlearning generations of inherited emotional repression.
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