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

Men are shockingly misrepresented in the media and academia, and the way that people presume that men are things a million miles from the ... We take the examples of the worst possible man, the worst possible behavior, and we generalize it, uh, to all men. And then we go around to schools warning boys to not be that guy. (whoosh)

Why did you found the Center for Male Psychology?

There's a couple of reasons. One is the, the general need for more accurate information on men's psychology. Um, and, uh, the other was, uh, because we had to, uh, uh, already got a male psychology section of the British Psychological Society that was, uh, facing the professional, uh, people dealing with psychology and men's mental health. Uh, but we also needed to have something that was more public-facing because I found over the years, we've been doing this about 10 years, 12 years now, um, 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. Uh, 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 they're, uh, seems to have more insights than a lot of people who are in psychology. I say that, and I feel a bit embarrassed for, for my profession.

Why do you think that is?

Uh, well, I think that there's a ... It's a lot of it is the "education," in inverted commas, that we get about gender, especially, um, in psychology. Part of it is that we, uh, there's a bit of a blind spot in that we don't really even focus on men as, as a topic of interest, uh, eh, wh- at any level of psychology education. Uh, the one exception now is, um, the University of Sunderland who's got a module, an undergraduate module on male psychology, which gets brilliant feedback, but it's, it's the one, um, piece of, of a, a, a module in the world that, that focuses on male psychology. So we have, um, on one side a blind spot to, to even looking in that direction. Uh, 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, uh, what people see. So, we, we tend to, um, see men as, as being y- really the architects of their own problems. Um, there's n- uh, there's f- a fair bit of what you could call victim blaming that happens. So if, if men have mental health problems and they fail to seek therapy or any kind of help and they don't speak to people 'cause they're too manly and stoical, well, it's their own fault, kind of, if, if they end up, um, you know, ending their own lives. Uh, and there's that kind of ... I mean, I, I actually, i- on my undergraduate, uh, degree back in the '90s, um, when we were discussing male suicide, which was a f- uh, uh, it was discussed w- i- in the space of about two minutes compared to, to talking about, um, lots of other topics i- in mental health, including women's d- depression, which we des- uh, really went into s- quite some detail. When it came to explaining male suicide, um, given that women are twice as likely to have, um, uh, uh, severe depression than men are, um, but men have three times more likely to commit suicide than women are. Um, but, uh, the explanation given was that men are better at DIY, so they just construct better methods of getting rid of themselves. And, uh, i- in my seminar group, that got a little kind of ripple of, uh, laughter, and I was kind of, I was sitting there thinking, "Well, you know, I'm not h- I'm, I'm here to learn, um, but I'm just, I'm not really sure I'm, 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, um, uh, we had a break and someone came up to me and said, it was a woman, she said, uh, you know, "Well done. I don't know how you managed to sit there through that and say nothing." And I, and, uh, I mean, I just, as I said, like, y- and lots of students have, I think, the same. You know, you're, you're there to learn. You're, you, you absorb this information. You think, "A- it's a professor telling me this. It must be true." And, uh, you know, so we, we just don't get enough accurate information about men's psychology.