The Masculinity Crisis: What Is Actually Happening to Men

There is a culture war being fought over men, and the loudest voices on both sides are missing something important. On one side: the claim that masculinity itself is in crisis, that men are under attack, that traditional male identity is being dismantled by social forces hostile to men. On the other: the counter-claim that the “masculinity crisis” is a right-wing talking point, that men remain structurally privileged, that the problem is not masculinity but its most toxic expressions.

Both of these positions are, to a clinician, largely beside the point. What matters is what is actually happening to men in consulting rooms, in emergency departments, in divorce proceedings, in addiction units, and in the statistics on suicide, premature mortality, and social isolation that have been quietly worsening for decades.

Something is happening to men. It is real. And understanding it requires setting aside the culture war to look at what the evidence and clinical experience actually show.

What the Data Shows

Men die younger than women — by an average of four to five years in the UK, a gap that has narrowed but not closed. Men account for around three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, a proportion that has been consistent for decades. Men are significantly less likely to seek help for mental health difficulties, less likely to be in therapy, and less likely to have the kind of close, intimate friendships that buffer against psychological distress.

The UK Community Life Survey (2024) found that men systematically under-report loneliness because social norms discourage them from admitting vulnerability. Research by King’s College London (2023) described men’s loneliness as “misunderstood” — expressed not through disclosure but through withdrawal, irritability, and risky behaviour. Men are three times more likely than women to develop alcohol dependence. They are overrepresented in every category of externalising psychological difficulty: aggression, antisocial behaviour, addiction.

These are not the statistics of a group who are doing fine. But they are also not straightforwardly the statistics of a group who are “victims of feminism” or any other simplistic narrative. They are the statistics of a group who have been given, for generations, a particular script for how to be — and for whom that script is increasingly inadequate to the complexity of contemporary life.

What Masculinity Actually Is

Masculinity is not a fixed biological fact. It is a set of norms, expectations, and identity prescriptions that are culturally transmitted, historically variable, and psychologically enforced — both externally, by social sanction, and internally, by shame.

The traditional masculine script has several core elements: self-sufficiency (a man does not need help), emotional restraint (a man does not show vulnerability), competence and achievement (a man earns his worth through what he produces), and protection (a man’s value is measured by his ability to protect others). These norms have varying degrees of functionality depending on context. They may be adaptive in certain conditions — sustained effort, physical endurance, the suppression of fear in genuinely dangerous situations. They become pathological when they are applied rigidly across all of life, or when they prevent a man from accessing the resources — emotional, relational, professional — that would allow him to function and grow.

The problem is not masculinity as such. The problem is the brittleness of an identity built entirely on external achievement and emotional suppression, and the catastrophic vulnerability that brittleness creates when life — as it always eventually does — becomes difficult.

What the Crisis Actually Consists Of

From a clinical perspective, the masculinity crisis is not primarily about culture war. It is about three specific failures of the masculine identity script in contemporary conditions.

The failure of the achievement identity. Many men have built their entire sense of self on what they do — their job, their income, their professional status. This works, after a fashion, while those things are stable. It fails catastrophically when they are not: redundancy, business failure, retirement, illness, or any of the other ordinary losses that life brings. The man who has only ever known himself as what he achieves has no self to fall back on when achievement is no longer available.

The failure of emotional suppression as a coping strategy. Men are systematically socialised to suppress emotional distress. This is not without cost. Suppressed emotion does not disappear — it accumulates, expresses itself somatically (in chronic pain, in physical illness, in the body’s stress-response systems), and eventually, when the pressure becomes sufficient, it explodes. The middle-aged man who suddenly leaves his marriage, develops an addiction, or has a breakdown is often not in the grip of something new — he is experiencing the accumulated weight of decades of suppressed psychological material finding its only available outlet.

The failure of the relational model. Traditional masculinity organised male relationships around activity and function rather than intimacy and disclosure. This creates social networks that are real but thin — organised around sport, work, or shared activity, with little capacity for the kind of vulnerable reciprocal communication that would constitute genuine emotional support. When life becomes difficult, these networks offer relatively little. Men in crisis have, on average, far fewer people they can talk to honestly than women in equivalent situations.

What Jung Saw

Carl Jung understood something about masculinity that has become increasingly important. He described the persona — the social mask through which we present ourselves to the world — as a necessary but potentially fatal adaptation. The man who identifies entirely with his masculine persona, Jung argued, does not thereby become more himself; he becomes less. The aspects of experience that the persona excludes — vulnerability, dependency, the full range of emotional life — do not simply disappear. They accumulate in what Jung called the Shadow: present, powerful, and actively influencing the person’s life in ways he cannot account for.

The men who present as most rigidly masculine — most controlled, most self-sufficient, most emotionally opaque — are often carrying the heaviest shadow material. The brittleness of the controlled exterior is, paradoxically, a sign of how much is being held down, not how little.

Jung also described the individuation process — the development of a genuinely integrated self — as requiring, at some point, the dissolution of the persona and the encounter with what lies beneath it. For many men, this happens not by choice but through crisis: the breakdown, the addiction, the affair, the illness that finally strips away the functional exterior and confronts the man with his actual inner life.

Therapy, when it works, allows this encounter to happen with some support rather than in freefall.

What This Means Practically

The masculinity crisis is not solved by telling men to be more like women, or by romanticising traditional masculinity, or by any of the other cultural interventions that currently occupy the debate. It is addressed, one man at a time, by creating conditions in which the actual cost of the masculine script becomes visible and in which something different becomes possible.

This requires, first, safety: an environment in which vulnerability is not punished. For most men, this is not the condition of their ordinary social life. It is, or should be, the condition of the therapeutic relationship.

It requires, second, language: the gradual development of a vocabulary for inner experience that the masculine script has systematically prevented. This is not a simple task. It is, in my clinical experience, some of the most important and most difficult work a man can do.

And it requires, third, time: the willingness to sit with discomfort rather than solving, achieving, or escaping one’s way out of it. For men trained by decades of external orientation, this is rarely easy. It is almost always worth it.

Further reading:

• The male loneliness epidemic
• Male burnout: what it is and what to do
• Male depression: what it actually looks like
• What is shadow work?
• Book an initial consultation

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a Jungian analyst and integrative psychotherapist with over 25 years of clinical experience and a doctoral specialisation in masculinity and identity. He practises at Harley Street, London W1.

References

• ONS (2024). Suicide rates in England and Wales by sex.
• UK Community Life Survey (2024).
• King’s College London (2023). Men’s loneliness is misunderstood. Cited in The Sociology Guy (2025).
• Jung, C.G. (1928). The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7). Princeton University Press.
• Addis, M.E. & Mahalik, J.R. (2003). Men, masculinity, and the contexts of help seeking. American Psychologist, 58(1), 5–14.

Part of our men’s mental health series — see also Male Burnout, Male Depression, Male Eating Disorders, The Male Loneliness Epidemic. Ready to talk? psychotherapy in Central London.