Last month saw International Men’s Day, a day which often raises questions and inspires articles around male mental health (as the UK arm of the day mentions), along with the high male suicide rate in the UK. Men account for three-quarters of the suicides in the UK (ONS, 2024) and there have been charities set up that strive to improve the conversations around male mental health and suicide. These include Movember, HeadsUP, Men’s Minds Matter and CALM – all of which run campaigns on getting men to talk more about their mental health.

Whilst this is admirable, it is only one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to understanding experiences that may be seen as uncommon or not accepted, people often look to fictional media for examples and may use these to educate themselves on what that experience is like.

With mental illness and suicide specifically, film and television representations allow audiences to see what an experience may look like (Johnson and Oliffe, 2023). What often occurs is a stereotyping of certain experiences – audiences may expect certain physical acts and gestures to connote grief, love, or sadness, for instance. The same occurs with mental illness, and so when it comes to male mental illness and suicide onscreen, this can be an issue.

Why? Simply put, many of the representations of male suicide and mental illness onscreen are very limited. By this I mean that the characters who suffer with mental illness are very rarely the protagonist, but often secondary characters who aren’t engaged with in much detail.

These characters are often shown to be failing in some way – usually in a masculine role as father, brother, or within a workplace – upholding an idea of male mental illness as a failure of masculinity. By pushing aside how the experience feels, audiences are told repeatedly that men’s emotional experience isn’t relevant, but their failure to uphold a role is.

As well as not being the focus of a story, when men onscreen do have mental illness or suicidal behaviour, this is often not shown in detail, and the emotions are avoided. It is not that the diagnosis or actions are not mentioned, but rarely are men shown in distress or crying onscreen face on.

In recent examples, including Aftersun (2022), The Starling (2021), the men who have suicidal thoughts are not foregrounded, and neither are their emotions. There is one scene in Aftersun where Father Calum (Paul Mescal) is heard crying, but we do not see his face. Very rarely do UK or US films present close-ups of men crying, even in such distressing circumstances as feeling suicidal.

With the lack of displays of male suffering and emotion onscreen, it becomes an understood idea that it is something to be ashamed of, something to be hidden.

This tracks with cultural norms and ideas: in a recent YouGov survey, nearly half of men stated they are uncomfortable crying in front of other men, as opposed to only 18% of women. Film representations continue to reinforce that men are not to be shown crying or in distress.

By continuing to represent men in this way, films are teaching audiences that when a man does suffer with mental illness, it is a subversion or failure of masculine ideals.

In order to truly address the stereotypes of men as unemotional and tackle problems like men’s mental health, more needs to be done to address it beyond awareness. Changing cultural representations – what people see regularly, which establishes understood patterns and attitudes – is essential.

Whilst films and television do not have to reflect real life, they do have the power to influence it. At present, the restrictive portrayals of male mental illness and suicide may reflect men’s poor help-seeking for their mental health, but there is room for the fictional world to offer a different way forward, a positive portrayal that may function as aspirational.