Dr. John Oliffe - The True (And Troubling) Face Of Men's Health
ManTalks Podcast
Connor Beaton
4.8 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Talking points: mental health, masculinity, culture
When Movember reaches out, you answer the call. I'm grateful to have interviewed Professor John Oliffe on a recent report co-authored by him—and spearheaded by the Movember Institute for Men's Health. Some of the stats they've released left me a little surprised; like 2 in 5 men in Canada die prematurely, and from largely preventable casues. Listen to this one, team.
(00:00:00) - Intro, and the premature mortality of men
(00:10:29) - On co-constructed masculinity, and how modern complexity affects how we perceive manhood
(00:16:26) - On “protest masculinity”, and what’s causing men to die early?
(00:22:34) - Depression, suicide, and getting upstream of the risk factors
(00:32:120) - Why hiding what you’re going through so common, and why some men dismiss the healthcare system
(00:40:06) - What Dr. Oliffe would say to the man reluctant to see a therapist
(00:44:49) - The changes and diversity of modern masculinity
Dr. John Oliffe is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Men’s Health Promotion at the School of Nursing, University of British Columbia. Founder and lead investigator of UBC’s Men’s Health Research program, his work focuses on masculinities as it influences men’s health behaviours and illness management, and its impact on partners, families, and overall life quality. Findings drawn from his research offer guidance to clinicians and researchers to advance men’s health promotion in the areas of psychosocial prostate cancer care, smoking cessation and male suicide prevention.
For those of you in Vancouver, check out the formal launch of John and Movember's work here: https://nursing.ubc.ca/community/events/2025/launch-real-face-of-mens-health-report
Connect with Dr. Oliffe
-Website: www.menshealthresearch.ubc.ca
-LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/johnoliffe
***
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Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, Dr. Olif, how are you doing today? Yeah, good. Thank you, Karen. Nice to have a chat. |
| 0:10.5 | Yeah, we're going to dive in, men's mental health. So, you know, interestingly enough, |
| 0:14.6 | the team from November had reached out to me. I think we were talking about this before, |
| 0:17.8 | we just sort of hit record here, but they had reached out to me with this new piece of research, a men's health report for Canada, and there were some very |
| 0:25.0 | interesting findings in there, and I thought it would be worthwhile to chat with you. So maybe just |
| 0:29.9 | lay out the kind of the broad spectrum pieces of what your findings revealed, and then maybe we'll |
| 0:35.7 | go deeper into each of them. Yeah, there's a couple |
| 0:39.1 | of empirical chapters within this report. It's a, it's a big report. It's kind of glossy. It's got |
| 0:44.4 | pictures and high level stat. So it's, it doesn't read long, but it is long, you know, in terms of |
| 0:50.1 | pages. But just to say, a couple of the interesting things, you know, this affirmation that men |
| 0:55.4 | are dying prematurely, you know, so 44% of guys in Canada are dying before age 75 from preventable |
| 1:02.0 | causes. And I think that's, you know, it might not be necessarily new, but I think empirically, |
| 1:07.4 | it really says something for this current time. We did some work around caregivers. |
| 1:13.2 | You know, so when a guy's not got great health, it often defaults to the people around him |
| 1:17.7 | and the costs that are associated for those people. |
| 1:20.5 | And we also did some research in terms of, you know, how guys do and don't connect with |
| 1:26.0 | primary health care. |
| 1:29.0 | And again, you know, |
| 1:35.6 | oftentimes we've belaboured the idea blokes don't go in and seek help. And this kind of pushes back on that a little bit. It acknowledges that, but also they talk to some structural |
| 1:40.7 | elements around that. I mean, you guys dug into some interesting pieces as well because you've, one of the |
| 1:47.0 | things that I've talked about on my show, but also in podcasts that I've done is the impact |
| 1:51.1 | of fatherless homes and, you know, how many men that are at some point homeless or |
... |
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