“It’s Not Shameful To Be Vulnerable”: Men’s Health Group Launches In Cannonvale

Men are afraid of vulnerability. “There is an idea that it is a kind of weakness,” Cannonvale local Bob Eden said. “Men think that others will use it against them; use it to get a foot up on one another. That’s not the case.”

Mr Eden - whose first novel, ‘The Gift of Depression, My Little Scrap Book’, is part memoir, part treatise on mental illness – recently accomplished a 15-year ambition of starting a local wellbeing group in the Whitsundays.

Mr Eden, alongside Real Mates Talk’s Suicide Prevention Worker for the Whitsundays Adam Richards, has run two sessions of the Cannonvale Wellbeing Group.

With the backing of popular men’s health campaign Real Mates Talk and the backing of Mr Richards, Mr Eden has facilitated the event to a growing number of supporters.

“We have to do things in this area, because there’s a great need in this area for a support group of this type,” Mr Eden said.

“I’ve been trying to get this going for more than two decades and, using the banner and message of Real Mates Talk, it’s an opportunity to continue my mission, which is to eradicate suicide.”

Across the Whitsundays, Isaac, and Mackay, where Real Mates Talk began, the need for a men’s mental health campaign was obvious. Real Mates Talk reports around three quarters of people who die by suicide across the region are men.

That fact is reflected in the national average, too: The Australian Bureau of Statistics states that 72 per cent of deaths by suicide are male, despite the population share being higher for females.

Mr Eden said that comes from institutionalised ideas of “personal weakness”.

“It’s in the name: Let’s get mates to talk real,” Mr Eden said.

“It’s a male thing and a Queensland thing where you ask how they’re going and they say, ‘it’s all good! I’m good, mate’. They’re lying because they’re scared of the stigma of mental health.”

Medical literature agrees: Men resoundingly hold more stigmatising attitudes towards those with depression, anxiety, and who die by suicide.

Genuine mental health concerns are seen, mistakenly, as a “discrediting mark”, according to a American Journal of Men’s Health piece, ‘Men’s Experiences of Mental Illness Stigma Across the Lifespan: A Scoping Review’.

Men enduring mental health concerns can feel burdened by a form of stereotyping, prejudice, and inevitably a “self-stigma” – where those suffering turn the publicly endorsed stigmatising against themselves.

It is the antiquated adages: ‘Men Should Be Men’ and ‘Men Don’t Cry’.

Mr Eden, whose personal struggles with “The Black Dog” have led him on a crusade against depression, said small, community events like the Real Mates Talk Cannonvale Wellbeing Group were steps to challenging and destroying that stigma.

“Men can overcome the programmed belief that is shameful to be vulnerable,” he said.

“That’s what this is all about.”

The Cannonvale Wellbeing Group meets every Wednesday at the Cannonvale Skate Park gazebo from 10.00am to 11.30am.

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Real Mates Talk ambassador and author Bob Eden with AJ Shoesmith, and Daniel Campbell at last week’s Cannonvale Wellbeing Group meeting