Getting men to get the help they need

Two recent moves show how New York is building more doors into mental healthcare. The 2025 Lieutenant Joseph Banish Mental Health Act protects confidential peer counseling for police officers. And the state's recognition this spring of Suffolk County's Response Crisis Center honors crisis response, suicide prevention and the work of helping families find care before it is too late.

But access is only half the challenge. The other half is stigma, especially for boys and men taught to see need as weakness, fear as failure and silence as strength. Too many men are trained to perform control, competence and calm when what they need is support.

I spent years mistaking my own silence for strength. I built a career in high-stakes, high-pressure New York City newsrooms and tech while trying to outrun anxiety, depression and addiction rooted in adverse childhood experiences — early exposure to instability, violence, neglect or chronic stress that can shape a child's nervous system.

By the time I finally stopped running, I was hypervigilant, shut down and ashamed of needing help. On the outside, I looked high-functioning. Inside, I was white-knuckling my way through fatherhood, marriage, work and everyday human contact. Not long after, I was diagnosed with PTSD.

My story is personal, but the pattern is not. Research on men's mental health stigma has found that shame and fear impedes disclosure, weakens social connection and reduces use of services. Young adult men receive mental health treatment at significantly lower rates than young adult women, federal data show.

That lesson starts early. Boys learn to minimize pain, turn fear into anger, mistake silence for resilience. We praise the boy who "toughs it out," the athlete who plays despite injury, the officer who absorbs trauma without showing it. Then we act surprised when men cannot name what is happening inside them until it comes out sideways.

Researchers sometimes call this the "male emotional funnel." Boys begin life with the full range of human feeling, but culture steadily narrows what is acceptable. Feelings like sadness, fear and tenderness get squeezed into the few responses men are often permitted to show: anger, control, withdrawal, achievement, risk or numbness.

The costs are everywhere: depression, addiction, social isolation, family stress. Men are less likely than women to seek mental healthcare, which means distress often goes untreated until it becomes more acute, and harder to repair. Men die by suicide at almost four times the rate of women.

The work of the Response Crisis Center matters. Confidential peer support matters. But those supports can only help when someone believes that reaching out will not make him weak, unemployable or alone.

We get there by countering the stigma long before crisis. Schools, unions and faith communities can make emotional honesty ordinary by putting trusted men in visible conversation about stress, fear, anger and repair. Fathers can apologize and name their own struggles.

I was raised on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," and later became Fred Rogers' actual Nantucket neighbor. That unlikely gift gave me access not just to his warmth, but to the wisdom beneath it. Fred often offered a simple formula: "Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable."

Rogers' adage isn't sentiment. It's public health, suicide prevention and family preservation.

New York is opening more doors. We need men to stand beside one another and tell each other to walk through them.

This guest essay reflects the views of Benjamin Wagner, a journalist, filmmaker, coach and consultant currently writing a book on men and mental health.