The Current - A crisis in men’s health

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Men are struggling – according to a new study on men’s health. New data from the Movember Institute of Men’s Health shows that nearly half of Canadian men will die prematurely – before the age of 75 – from largely preventable causes. Men also account for three out of every four suicides in the country. Former Health Minister Mark Holland and study author and UBC professor Dr. John Oliffe, discuss the systemic, social, and psychological factors behind these outcomes, and call for a national men’s health strategy.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Just a warning, the conversation we're about to have deals with suicide. About nine years ago, Jivan Dhaliwal went into a dark mental health spiral. He started questioning his self-worth, his achievements, his life. That led to me becoming my own worst enemy in all aspects of my life. I developed severe OCD thinking I was constantly making mistakes. I could not do anything right to the point where I was checking doors a hundred times. I was rewriting something a hundred times. I would sleep maybe two, three days a week and I was up all night for the rest of the time. And it got to the point

where I felt like as a burden on everyone around me, that they would be better off without me being there. He contemplated taking his own life, but that led him to seek help. I decided to pursue some informal therapy groups and then I also looked at discussing with friends and family, having all of us had gone through this before with our former friend who took his life, I became a bit more open with my friends without telling them everything because culturally there was a bit of shame in South Asian culture, there was a big stigma around mental health. And at that time, there was still a lot of discussion about masculinity, about being tough and hiding your feelings and just putting everything negative to the back of your mind. Jeevain Dalewal now helps others through a mental health organization for South Asian

men in Brampton, Ontario. And according to a new study released by the Movember Institute of Men's Health, men account for three in every four suicides in Canada. And nearly half of Canadian men will die prematurely, that is, before the age of 75, from largely preventable causes.

Three quarters of opioid-related deaths are also men. Mark Holland is a former federal minister of health. He's urging action to address this crisis in men's health.

And he's also encouraging the use of related deaths are also men. Mark Holland is a former federal minister of health. He's urging action to address this crisis in men's health. Good morning, Mark. Good morning. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So pretty dark statistics. You're calling it a crisis.

Is that the right way to describe this? 100%. There's absolutely no doubt. I mean, you're talking about two and five men dying prematurely as a result of largely preventable causes. This is not only affecting statistics about men dying early, it's having a devastating impact on their quality of life and the quality of life of people around them. I think that we're in a circumstance where traditional views of masculinity and how we should comport ourselves as men and what we can express and can't express is not only

meaning that people aren't seeking help, but they're being locked in their suffering in a way that is incredibly destructive. We just heard from Jeevan. You have talked frankly about your own mental health struggles. What would you say to Jeevan and other men listening who have been in that place? Well, I think when you are in that place, you feel very trapped. And you feel very trapped because you have a notion of who you're supposed to be. You know, I was told men don't cry, men don't show weakness, men are tough.

If you come out and express a need for help, that that is a demonstration of weakness and of you not being worthy, not being worthy of a good job, not being worthy of a strong relationship. And so, there's an enormous self-criticism that you go through when you're in a weak moment, when you're feeling so heavy and so you don't talk about it. And in the darkness of that shame, you know, is real, just really terrible destruction where you ravage yourself. just really terrible destruction where you ravage yourself. And, you know, and it's, when you're able to come out of it, when you're able to start to see that, you know,

it's actually safe and okay for me to share that, you know, I'm currently going through a struggle because we often talk about, you know, what happened, you know, I went through something tough, but I'm fine now, right? That's okay culturally to express, but, you know, we don't really know, I went through something tough, but I'm fine now, right? That's okay culturally to express. But, you know, we don't really have a culture of being able to say in a contemporary circumstance, I'm really struggling. I'm finding it really tough. How did you come to that spot? I mean, what did it take for you to be able to cope with your own mental health needs?

Well, I think you have to abandon the idea of who you want to be and accept who you are. And you know, for me, I had a vision of that was informed by, you know, the cultural environment that I was in, how I was raised. You know, I had this idea of myself and I was so invested in that idea that I didn't want to give it up. And when you realize that it will destroy you to hold on to that, then you have to become something new and you have to admit that there are parts of you that are very vulnerable and weak and hurt and that I had trauma that I hadn't addressed, that there was pain that

I hadn't acknowledged and that I needed help to be able to get through it. And that help isn't just about, yes, there's going to therapy, but it also is showing up a different way in life with your armor down, admitting there are things you don't know, there are things that scare you, that you're somebody who suffers from anxiety and fear, that you don't always feel like you have it together. And, you know, I didn't think I could do that and be successful. And what ended up happening in my case was if I didn't admit that, I would have been destroyed. That the lie of pretending everything was perfect became so unbearable to hold that there was only one path and the alternative was

honesty and authenticity. You used the word shame a moment ago. How hard was it to get over that part? Devastating, you know. I think I was raised with a very, very clear view of what it was to be a man clear view of what it was to be a man. And I really felt that I was letting myself down, letting my family down, letting the people who cared about me down. I felt like by admitting that I felt that weakness and that I wasn't what I was projecting, that I was a failure and had no idea how the world would greet me as a person who had these vulnerabilities and had these anxieties. And so, it took basically being at that point where, you know, do you choose to cease living because you're in so much pain. Did you get there? I did. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, I was in a situation where, you know, I made an attempt at my life and

during it, thought about, you know, being a kid and having a very similar situation and how much it affected me and thinking like, you know, I can't do this anymore and I do want to be in the world. I have things that I love and that, you and that even if I am a complete failure by admitting these weaknesses, it's better than not being in the world and the pain that it would cause in exiting it. way to go through this, you became health minister. When you were in that very influential position, did you know the extent of the issue with men's health? I think it's been revelatory and it's been slow to kind of dawn on, you know, I was the chief government whip and when you're the whip, you get to see behind the curtain in

everybody's lives. And I think it was so shocking to me to see the extent to which really strong people were shouldering unbelievable pain and trauma. And it started to become apparent to me in that there was so much suffering under the surface of men that they don't talk about. And so, you know, I think putting statistics to it, I think brings it in sharp relief. I think it is a very sobering bit of business and I don't think we understand just how much damage it does. You know, we talk a lot about the isolation of young men today and them feeling a lot of anger and being left out. And I think it's because, you know, as men, we haven't found a way to be able to hold this notion of masculinity and who we are as men,

and then also talk about the hard realities of the things that we suffer and go through and have a find ways to communicate those and still feel proud of our story. And of course, you know, you've been talking about mental health, but these conditioning elements also affect how men treat symptoms of disease. I mean, I saw that, you know, most men wait six days with symptoms before they see a doctor.

What do you think can be done here and now about redressing this gap for men in how they approach their own healthcare? Well, I think a huge part of it is I look back, here I was health minister, I was with heart and stroke, I talked about prevention, and my family would joke certainly back in the day about my refusal to go into a doctor, right? And it was a point of pride.

I played football and if you got knocked to the ground and you hit like a ton of bricks, the fact that you got back up and pretended like it wasn't affecting you was a point of pride. And you know, interesting, you see this with firefighters. It used to be if you go into a fire hall and you were covered in soot and came out of the fire, that's the image of a hero.

Firefighters learned that that is profoundly unhealthy, that like covered in soot and like having your dirty uniform means that you're going to be susceptible to carcinogens. So now the culture is about making sure that everything is clean and that when you walk into a fire or out, you know, as soon as you come out of a fire, you're getting changed and you're not carrying that around. And so I think we have this core identity that's been fed by our culture, this idea of masculinity,

of being iron, of being able to take anything about being able to suffer and like a virtue placed to that. And I think we have to attack that. You're well accustomed with tight budgets. What do you think deserves funding in order to look at men's health from a preventative standard? I mean, what can be done? Well, I think a ton can be done. And I think we have to look at how much it's costing us. You know, the top five leading causes of chronic disease cost this country about $13 billion a year thereabouts.

It is an enormous amount of money and it's growing. $13 billion meaning that's what we pay for preventable. Stuff that we shouldn't be paying. You know, like there's so much there that has no business. Our hospitals and our waiting rooms are replete with conditions that should not be there. And if you look at it, so much of it is about mental health. So much of it is about, because you can talk to somebody, oh, you need to exercise, you need to eat well, you need to watch your blood pressure or watch your stress.

But if your mental health is poor, like good luck starting any of those things. You're not going to start an exercise regime if your mental health is garbage. So, you know, we need to have a national plan. Ireland did this in 2008. They've already seen a huge increase in life expectancy for men. A national plan to do what? Well, to look at how we attack the problem of men health. Remember, we had it in 1999, we did something on women's health. We've made huge strides on women's health. We still got a long way to go. But on men's health, we're way behind.

And I think we have allowed to get it to a crisis point. And we're going to pay the price, not just in terms of illness, not just in terms of lost productivity, but losing the people that we love. And these numbers say it starkly. And so what do we need to do? What do we need to do is we need a shift in the way that we culturally approach masculinity. We need a cultural shift in terms of the investments in prevention. Why did I spend so much time on dental care and pharmacare?

I pushed these things because they're not just matters of social justice. Because when people get access to care, we save boatloads of money. And there's a lot of evidence that says if you get somebody into one appointment, right, they go to that dentist appointment, then oh, you have high blood pressure. Have you gone and looked at the source of that? It starts a conversation. Any access to care improves all care. So prevention and getting people in to see, it doesn't matter if you're seeing a hygienist or a dentist or if you're seeing an optometrist or if you're seeing a general practitioner or a pharmacist, that's an entry point to care and it's an entry point to conversation around prevention and we need to

match it with a national conversation that changes what we celebrate in men. You know, I think that we need to be celebrating in men the people who openly talk about the struggles of being a human being. And my God, if you're not struggling and having a hard time in this moment of history, being a human being, I don't buy it. It is a tough, tough time to be a human being and we need a lot more sensitivity and openness around talking about the struggle of trying to look into the myths, the confusion of the time that we're in.

And men are expected to know all the answers. You know, you're expected, if you're a successful man, you're supposed to know exactly what's going to happen and this is going to happen and then that's going to happen and I know it. Come on. That's not realistic. Right now, we're living in a time of tumult and change. And I think there's a deep strength in celebrating the spirit of enlightenment, which is I know what I know, I don't know what I don't know, and here's the authentic truth of my condition and where I'm at. What would you say to the people listening about what signs to look for men themselves and the people who love them?

Well, I think we see, you know, we all have proud men in our life, and they're very accomplished and they've done great things, but they get very prickly when you point out certain elements of the way they're behaving or very prickly when they get a criticism in a particular area. That is a major alarm bell. That is that basically there is an area there they do not want to touch, they do not want to examine, they do not want to talk about. And the reason is they know that there's a lot of deep work and pain in that place and they're avoiding it. So they've built defense mechanisms around it.

Been there. And if I'm really honest, I still do it sometimes. And, and, and so now when I get really mad about something or I get really defensive about something, or if I'm too proud about something, that's a real opportunity for introspection. So how do you get at that armor, right? And I think you can't take it on in a full frontal assault because you're just gonna get into a defensive posture.

It's around having curiosity and kind of pulling at the edges of it. But I think when you see that in somebody you love, they're struggling more than maybe they're admitting. So watch for those things. Yeah. Thank you very much, Mark. Absolutely. Happy to do it.

Mark Holland is a former federal minister of health. Is drinking raw milk safe like RFK Junior suggests? Can you reduce a glucose spike if you eat your food in quote unquote the right order? I'm registered dietitian, Ab Abby Sharp. I host a nutrition myth busting podcast called Bite Back with Abby Sharp. And those are just some of the questions I tackle with qualified experts on my show. On Bite Back, my goal is to help listeners create a pleasurable relationship with food, their body and themselves, which in my opinion is the fundamental secret to good health. Listen to Bite Back wherever you get

your podcasts. Dr. John Oliff is one of the authors of that Movember Institute report called The Real Face of Men's Health. He leads the University of British Columbia's Men's Health Research Program. Dr. Oliff, good morning. Good morning. You just heard Mark talk about a crisis in men's health. Would you agree? I think he's very eloquent in the way he presents, you know, the issues and certainly a lot of the stats that you provided were revelatory in the report and provide us a real foundation on which to build an ask of government in terms of building a framework for men's health. You know, one of those stats is that suicide is the fourth leading cause of death of men

in Canada. I think a lot of our listeners would be surprised to hear that. What needs to happen in your view to help men seek help sooner? As Marcus suggested, that notion of weakness and not being able to look after your own problems and self-manage is one of the issues that makes it hard for guys to access services. But I would also say in terms of the structural determinants of health, we often have guys come into clinical practice, they might not be able to fully articulate what's going on

for them. And so the onus is on clinical services to think a little bit more widely about what's going on and ask some open-ended questions. So I'd just say in terms of suicidality, the three major risk factors for men are substance use, relationship breakdown being single, and a diagnosis of depression. So again, I think there's questions that we might want to ask when they do arrive in clinical practice to more fully engage them in the services that are there. You heard Jeevan talk about the stigma among South Asian men of talking about mental health and he used the word shame as well in terms of asking for help. How are you working with different cultural communities where you see this stigma and

how is it different amongst those communities? Yeah, I think there is some diversity in how particular groups or subgroups of guys, you know, experience mental health challenges. And to your point around shame, I would also say guilt is very, very hard to talk about and a lot of guys will harbour guilt about not being able to manage their own issues and needing help. So a lot of great community-based programs and they're examples of those even in terms of South Asian communities. Some of the temples provide really helpful places for men to congregate in healthy ways. So these health promotion spaces are things that we need to think about working with community to have some ownership and meeting the guys

for where they're at. Not necessarily always saying, well, you need to go to a hospital, you need to access professional services. I think community has a role in this, and I think we've got a nice history of having built those things. We haven't got such a great history of having sustained those programs. Obviously, it's not the standard across Canada in all geographic areas, in all demographics. What did you find in these statistics amongst Indigenous communities? Yeah, so disproportionately affected, a lot shorter lives, more than twice as likely to be dying from the preventable causes that we talk about in terms of cardiovascular disease, cancers, suicide, accidents.

So it's social determinants of health, it's the issues around access to services, but it's also about lower levels of income, lower levels of education, and health literacy we often talk about as being a barrier to accessing services and being able to engage with services. So we've got some real hot spots in terms of, you know, the geographies in Canada where higher numbers of Indigenous men are aggregated and, you know, we're seeing those disparities in those locales. Do you see a difference in the way women relate to healthcare and men relating to healthcare in talking about even accessing it or having a relationship with a healthcare provider

or having a woman nagging a man to go to the doctor, which seems quite common. You know, empirically, I think we know that many women will have a linkage to healthcare services by virtue of regular checks around reproductive health. Oftentimes, a guy won't necessarily have a connection to healthcare services until he's got a problem because there's nothing bringing him in necessarily for those preventative

pieces or health promotion pieces. It's a bit of a cultural difference. In terms of the nagging piece, it's so interesting. A lot of times when we talk to fellows, they'll talk to us about having been told they need to come into clinical practice. So it does prevail, but I would just say that sometimes that's about, you know, the permission to come in and the affirmation to act. And it's not perfect, but we hear that story a lot as a reason and almost a justification for when guys show up in clinical practice. I think we're trying

to work to emancipate guys to act earlier and of their own volition in terms of checking things out earlier on when they, rather than when they're in crisis or got pain necessarily. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of work to do on this idea of let's prevent you getting to the crisis by accessing healthcare earlier. Absolutely. So raising that possibility that there's a benefit in just having regular checks. And there's lots of resources too. I think we've diversified a little bit

in terms of how we think about help. So it might not necessarily be a family physician. There's lots of reputable things on the internet. I think about Heads Up Guys is a terrific resource for fellows who are thinking that they might have some challenges around their mental health. So there are some avenues by which we can sort of help guys build a protective kind of piece around their health and I'd say too we talked to a lot of guys about their willingness to help other men and often and fully the

guys will say yeah I'd always have my mates back. I'd always look out for him. What they're not so good at doing is asking for help from some of their peers. Mark talked about a national health strategy for men as there has been for, I think, 25 years for women's health strategies. In your thinking about this, what would that look like?

In the report, we've written three pieces around this. We're looking for a framework, first and foremost, that helps men build health literacy, so that idea that we can help to shift some of the behaviors that norm their ability to go in and seek help. And we'd like to start early with young men in schools. The second one is about building capacity in the healthcare services. And that is more ably helping healthcare providers to engage men when they come into services

and more creatively thinking about how we sustain the great health promotion products and programs that this country is known for. The third thing, interestingly, in putting this report together, we noted that it was really tough to get hold of longitudinal data to be able to give a coherent story. And so we're wanting also to collect data over a period of time so we can say something

about what's working and also adjust what we think might make improvements for men's health. You know, the government has a lot of priorities. How urgent would you say this should be addressed? You know, I come from a clinical background and we triage the most important things to the top. And this is top of list. It needs to be addressed.

There's a lovely moment in the report where we talk about caregiver burden for one of the better term. And we know that when men aren't tracking well there's spillover effects oftentimes on spouse and oftentimes by extension on women partners and they're losing money, their mental health is compromised by the pressures to provide help for a guy who's not tracking well and I just also say that after age 75, men and women in Canada are equally likely to

have to provide care to a spouse. So that capacity for men to provide care also would be enhanced by us doing a lot better job around men's health. All great points. Dr. John Olof, thank you very much. Thanks, Susan. Dr. John Olof heads UBC's Men's Health Research Program. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.