Religion is a Mental Illness

Hospital admissions for self-harm are up by two thirds amongst girls. This particular statistic caused so many headlines in various newspapers, with people writing think pieces about why girls were peculiarly afflicted with mental health issues.

But in fact, the evidence shows, and this is widely acknowledged by psychologists, that boys are more likely to self-harm in atypical ways. Boys are more likely to get into fights that they know they can't win. They're more likely to, for example, punch a wall or an inanimate object. And there's even some discussion as to whether carrying a knife in some circumstances could be classified as a form of self-harm. Obviously, that depends on intention.

But if those boys are injured to the extent that they require hospitalisation, that wouldn't be logged as an incident of self-harm because we associate self-harm with things like cutting and self-poisoning, which boys and men are, generally speaking, less likely to do.

Male violence, and violent men and boys, continues to be distorted through an antiquated, ideological lens, that fails to see what violence is, and where it comes from.

Once again, we lean into the same cartoonish, childlike, and conspiratorial interpretations of such behaviour.

It’s ‘the patriarchy incarnate’, or ‘male oppression made real’ you might hear, or ‘if he punches a wall, then he will surely punch you!’

Such asinine observations wouldn’t look out of place scrawled across the back pages of a teenager’s pop-psychology textbook; but are an unwelcome guest in the realm of grown-up discussion.

Frustratingly, the problematic behaviour of women and girls is rightly seen as the product of their environment and traumatic experiences…

Yet the cause of these same behaviours by males, are seen as internalised within men and boys themselves, and a product of so called “toxic” masculinity.

Meaning - when a woman has a problem we say, ‘we must fix society’, which is correct.

But when a man has a problem, we shake our heads and mutter ‘men must fix themselves’…

This is a fundamentally unbalanced, dishonest, and sexist approach to understanding male and female behaviour.

And such a lack of care, interest, or good faith within the study of male psychology, leads to glaring blind spots within mental health support, diagnosis, and policy, that hurts everyone.

We see it within the issue of self-harm, which remains a growing epidemic within young women and girls, hitting the headlines in recent years, as hospital admissions of girls increased exponentially.

Such headlines and data, make self-harm an issue heavily influenced by the female sex.

But is it that simple?

What if men and boys self-harm in atypical ways, outside of our traditional view?

That man punching a wall, or getting into unwinnable fights… could that be an act of self-harm?

What about men who have fantasies of violence; is it time we asked where such fantasies came from, rather than brandishing them as “toxic” too?

And are such men and boys most dangerous to others, or themselves?