What Men's Health Week Gets Wrong

This month I'm talking about Men's Health as this topic gets a week to itself later this month. I'd love to hear your thought and comments.

Men’s Health Week is a good thing. I want to be clear about that before I say what it gets wrong.

Every June, for one week, men’s health gets its moment. This year it runs from 15 to 21 June, with the theme “One Step at a Time”, progress not perfection. Posters go up. Step challenges launch. Someone in the office finally says the word “prostate” out loud. It raises the subject, and raising the subject matters.

And yet, year after year, the numbers barely move.

In Ireland, men still live around 3.6 years fewer than women. Cancer is now the leading cause of death in men, accounting for almost a third of all male deaths. Men are more likely than women to be overweight or obese, 63% against 50%. And the hardest number of all: in 2022, 346 of the 436 people who died by suicide in Ireland were men. Roughly four in five. The male suicide rate sits close to four times the female rate.

None of this is because men don’t care about their health. Walk into any gym at 6am and you’ll see plenty who clearly do. The trouble is that health, for a lot of men, becomes something you perform when you’re already well, and quietly avoid the moment something feels wrong. The check-up gets postponed. The odd symptom gets a wait-and-see. The flat mood gets explained away as tiredness.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years working in this space. Men’s Health Week is built on a quiet assumption. That the problem is awareness. That if men just understood the risks, they’d act.

But most men already know.

They know they should get the bloods done. They know they’re carrying a bit too much around the middle. They know the chest tightness, the short fuse, the 2am thoughts aren’t nothing. Awareness isn’t the bottleneck. The gap isn’t between not knowing and knowing. It’s between knowing and doing.

This matters at work more than we like to admit. Most workplace versions of Men’s Health Week are awareness campaigns, because awareness is the easy part to run. It fits on a poster. It fills a calendar slot. It photographs well for the internal newsletter. Making it genuinely easy for people to act, and building the kind of team where a man feels able to, is harder and rarely gets measured. So we keep doing the easy half and wondering why the outcomes don’t shift.

I’m 58, and I’ve spent the last seven years leading health promotion inside a large Irish organisation. I’ve watched this pattern up close. The men who most need to act are very often the quietest about it.

Why the gap stays open

Two reasons, mostly. The first is the script many of us were handed. Get on with it. Don’t make a fuss. Sort it yourself. Self-reliance is a fine quality, right up until it’s the thing stopping you from walking into a GP surgery.

I present on Stoic philosophy, and I’ll say this plainly, because it gets misused. Real Stoicism is about acting on what’s within your control. Booking the appointment is within your control. Toughing out a symptom you’ve been ignoring for months is not strength. It’s avoidance wearing strength’s coat.

The second reason is isolation. Men’s health rarely fails in a dramatic way. It fails quietly, alone, with no one close enough to notice the change and say “you don’t seem yourself lately, will you get that looked at.” A lot of men simply don’t have that person any more.

What actually helps

This is why I like this year’s theme. “One Step at a Time” points at the right problem. Not more information. One small action, repeated. So if you lead a team, or you just care about the men around you, the most useful thing you can do this week isn’t to share another infographic. It’s to make the doing easier, and less lonely.

Book the GP appointment during work hours, and treat that as completely normal. The real barrier is often the half-day off, not the fear.

Pair the action with another person. A walk and a proper conversation. A “we’re both getting our bloods done this month” arrangement. Men tend to act more readily alongside someone than alone.

Change the question. “How are you, really?” asked by a colleague lands differently than any poster ever will.

Awareness was never really the issue. Men know. What they often don’t have is permission to act, and someone to act alongside.

That’s the week worth running. Not louder. Closer.

Some recommended reading from books I've read lately.

Three this month, all circling the same theme.

Billy No Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem, by Max Dickins.

Max Dickins went looking for a best man for his wedding and realised he had nobody to ask. The book is part memoir, part investigation into why men’s friendships thin out in midlife, and why that slow, unremarked loss tends to resurface later as a health problem. It’s the clearest thing I’ve read on the link between male connection and male wellbeing, and it sits right underneath everything above. If Men’s Health Week gives you one prompt this year, let it be his: who would you actually call?

Notes on Being a Man, by Scott Galloway.

Scott Galloway is blunt, data-driven and hard to argue with on this. His thesis is that young men in particular have drifted, more of them lonely, adrift and online, and that the answer isn’t to apologise for masculinity but to give it something worth doing. “Action absorbs anxiety” is the line that stuck with me. He’s honest about his own anger and low periods, which is what keeps it from tipping into a lecture. Read it for the bigger cultural picture sitting behind the personal stuff above.

Sort Your Head Out: Mental Health Without All the Bollocks, by Sam Delaney.

If Galloway is the wide lens, Sam Delaney is the man in the chair beside you. It’s a memoir about addiction, recovery and finally learning to talk, told without a scrap of jargon or anything that feels like therapy-speak. Funny in places, raw in others. For the man who would never knowingly pick up a “mental health book”, this is the one that gets past the defences, precisely because it doesn’t look like one.