While men make up 50% of the population, they also make up almost 80% of suicides according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention website.

“It’s so much more common for men to kill themselves because they don’t like talking to therapists or people who are willing to help them because of the stigma around it,” said Ryker Marmon, 9. “The way you could break that would possibly be getting rid of the stigma, but it’s also the question of, ‘how do you do that?’”

Marmon explained that people joke about killing themselves and tell others to kill themselves and many of the people who say those things are men. While these phrases have been used more casually recently and usually in a “joking” manner, people never know what someone is going through and words have an effect on them. 

Marmon described how many men don’t want to talk to people about their mental health because they are afraid of how they will be perceived if they ask for help.

“I think recently its been better for men to talk about their mental health with therapy being accepted for males, but also it’s more about having men want to talk about their mental health because it’s always kind of this thing if you do

it, you’re seen as weak or inferior which its kind of died down on that ideology, but still, it’s more up to the person.”

When discussing a solution to the problem of the stigma around men’s mental health, Marmon pointed out that it’s not usually women who put a stigma around men’s mental health, it’s men.In order to make progress toward ending the stigma, it’s important to start at the beginning. 

“Starting the conversation of mental health from a young age instead of [mental health resources] just being there because somebody is having problems, [mental health] should always be a talked about thing rather than just because somebody needs it. It should be there when somebody needs it, but more specifically, it should always be there.”