You're listening to Well Now Slate's podcast on Health and Wellness. I'm Kavita Patel. And I'm Maya Feller.

Mental health is a topic, Kavita, that we've both wanted to tackle in multiple ways as we started making this show, wouldn't you say?

Absolutely. I think we had to try to resist the temptation to have the entire set of podcasts be about mental

health.

And that's for good reason.

It's just something that deserves more conversation, has so much of an impact on all

aspects of our life and health and wellness.

And we recently had a powerful conversation with New York State Health Commissioner,

Ashwin Vassan on the detrimental impact

social media has on teen mental health. And before that, we talked about the rise of eating

disorder diagnoses amongst boys and men with Dr. Jason Nagata. Yeah, both of those were really

powerful conversations. And this week, we're going to continue the conversation about

men's mental health at large. So, you know, to be clear, people of all genders can experience

mental illness, and we can all be impacted by feelings and emotions that have a real impact and

effect on our mental health. We also know through data that there are gender-based differences in anxiety and

depression. Women are twice as likely to develop depression. However, men die by suicide more often,

and it seems that depression may be underdiagnosed in men. Be a man, man up, these are all

sayings that so many of us have heard. The implicit

understanding is that men, especially cisgender men, are supposed to be strong all the

time. So this like performance of that dominant definition of masculinity leaves such little

space for vulnerability. And it really, in my estimation, Kavita, I feel like it encourages this toxic

behavior in thinking. In fact, there's still this stigma associated with men seeking support

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