Mental health crisis (Image AI Generated)
Over the last few years, the conversation about mental health has become louder. More campaigns, awareness days, and hashtags. However, the numbers reveal a different story than the one we keep telling ourselves. According to NCRB data, men accounted for 72.8% of all suicide fatalities in India in 2023. That is not a footnote. That's most of the problem, hiding in plain sight while we talk about everything except it.
According to Prakriti Saxena Poddar, Clinically Trained Mental Health and Wellbeing Expert, and Global Head at Roundglass, "People presume that males simply don't express their emotions. In reality, that is untrue. The messier truth is that most males were brought up to think that being strong meant not needing anything. Provide. Endure. Keep going. So when life actually gets hard, stepping back doesn't feel like an option, it feels like a failure."
"I've noticed this pattern in conversations again and again. Stress gets relabeled as "a work thing." Loneliness becomes "I'm just busy." Exhaustion becomes "that's just adulthood." None of it gets named for what it is, so none of it gets addressed," she added.
It's rarely about not knowing something is wrong. A man can clock that he's not sleeping right, that his mood has shifted, that he's running on fumes and still show up the next day and do everything he's supposed to do. Pay the bills. Be present at dinner. Answer emails. From the outside, it looks fine. That's almost the problem.
A lot of this traces back to how we've defined masculinity for generations, strength as endurance, vulnerability as weakness, emotion as something to manage quietly rather than say out loud. The result? A lot of men get really, really good at functioning while they're struggling. Which sounds like a strength. It's actually a warning sign.
Here's something that gets skipped over: a man can have friends, coworkers, a full social calendar, and still be lonely, not in the sense of being alone, but in the sense of having nowhere to say what's actually going on.
Friendships, especially as people get older, tend to organize themselves around logistics. Work talk. Scheduling. Catching up in five-minute bursts. The real conversations get rarer, not because people stop caring, but because nobody built the space for them.
That gap matters more than we give it credit for. We're not built to carry stress alone indefinitely, connection isn't just nice to have, it's protective.
Prakriti explains that it rarely shows up all at once. Untreated stress tends to drift, into anxiety, depression, irritability, sleep problems, sometimes substance use, sometimes just a slow withdrawal from everyone around you.
Families usually notice first, even if they can't name it. A partner picks up on the distance. Kids grow up around emotional patterns they don't have the language for yet, but absorb anyway. At work, it shows up as burnout, as people checking out, as turnover nobody can quite explain.
Maybe the bigger shift isn't about adding more services, it's about changing what we think mental health care is for. It shouldn't be the thing you reach for only once you've hit a wall. Think of it more like sleep, or exercise: not a last resort, just maintenance.
Taking care of your mental health isn't weakness. If anything, the people who manage stress well tend to be the ones others rely on, better decisions, steadier leadership, stronger relationships. These aren't "soft skills." They're just skills.
Support usually starts smaller than people expect, a conversation, a check-in, someone willing to listen without immediately trying to fix it.
Friends and family can help just by making it normal to talk about stress and pressure out loud naming the financial strain, the job uncertainty, the weight of expectations most men carry without ever putting into words. And maybe the most useful thing anyone can do is stop repeating the idea that the right move is to "tough it out." Strength was never about suffering quietly. It just got mistaken for that for a long time.
If close to three out of four suicide deaths in India involve men, that's not an individual issue, it's a public health one. And it starts with something simple: changing how we talk about this. Men shouldn't have to pick between being strong and asking for help. They were never actually opposites.
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