Does Psychology Have A Negative View Of Masculinity? - Dr John Barry - #576

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. John Barry. He's a Chartered Psychologist and Professional Researcher, co-founder of the Centre for Male Psychology, and a leading expert in men's mental health. Men and women both need help with their mental well-being, now more than ever. Yet, there seems to be a particular blindness when it comes to men's psychology and how to treat it, plus how to effectively communicate with men about their issues. Expect to learn why traditional masculinity is seen as problematic by the American Psychological Association, the most important factors that impact the well-being for a sample of over 4,000 men, the unique challenges that male psychology poses, how important it is for men to have a partner in life, whether men staring at women should be made illegal, and much more. This Monday, the David Goggins episode goes live, so make sure that you hit subscribe, and make sure that you have got your popcorn, and your running shoes, and your swear counter. Are we ready to go? I can't wait to release this. I'm so, so excited. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. John Barry.
Why did you found the Centre for Male Psychology?

**John Barry** (1:35)
There's a couple of reasons. One is the general need for more accurate information on men's psychology. And the other was because we had already got a male psychology section of the British Psychological Society that was facing the professional people dealing with psychology and men's mental health. But we also needed to have something that was more public facing because I found over the years, I've been doing this about 10 years, 12 years now, that there's actually a lot more interest and awareness, funnily enough, about men's psychology in the general public than there is within the profession of psychology. I was quite surprised when I started to understand this. But not only are people outside psychology more interested in male psychology or men's mental health, but there seems to have more insights than a lot of people who are in psychology. I say that and I feel a bit embarrassed for my profession.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
Why do you think that is?

**John Barry** (2:35)
Well, I think that a lot of it is the education in inverted commas that we get about gender, especially in psychology. Part of it is that there's a bit of a blind spot and that we don't really even focus on men as a topic of interest at any level of psychology education.
The one exception now is the University of Sunderland has got a module, an undergraduate module on male psychology, which gets brilliant feedback. But it's the one piece of a module in the world that focuses on male psychology. So we have on one side a blind spot to even looking in that direction. But also when we do look in that direction, we often have a kind of see it through a particular lens that sort of distorts what people see. So we tend to see men as being really the architects of our own problems. There's a fair bit of what you could call victim blaming that happens. So if men have mental health problems and they fail to seek therapy or any kind of help and they don't speak to people because they're too manly and stoical, well, it's their own fault, kind of, if they end up, you know, ending their own lives and there's that kind of, I mean, I actually on my undergraduate degree back in the 90s, when we were discussing male suicide, which was discussed in the space of about two minutes compared to talking about lots of other topics in mental health, including women's depression, which we really went into quite some detail. When it came to explaining male suicide, given that women are twice as likely to have severe depression than men are, but men have three times more likely to commit suicide than women are. But the explanation given was that men are better at DIY, so they just construct better methods of getting rid of themselves. And in my seminar group, that got a little kind of ripple of laughter, and I was kind of sitting there thinking, well, you know, I'm here to learn, but I'm just, I'm not really sure I'm learning anything very good here. There's no theory behind here. It's almost like we've just had a little bit of stand up. And outside afterwards, we had a break, and someone came up to you and said, it was a woman, so, you know, well done. I don't know how you managed to sit there through that and say nothing. And I mean, I just, as I said, like, you know, and lots of students are, I think, the same, you know, you're there to learn and you absorb this information. You think, as a professor telling me this, it must be true. And, you know, so we just don't get enough accurate information about men's psychology.