May 2026 Yon Hardisty

Issue #23: A Closer Look Into Men's Health

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Why Do Men Go Silent Around Their Health?

Hello friends,

Mental health and physical health have always been inseparable, yet for generations we have treated them like different departments in a building with no stairs between them. We scheduled checkups for the body and mostly hoped the mind would sort itself out. That approach has cost us dearly, and it has cost men in particular.

The research tells us a clear story. Men are significantly less likely to seek care for either mental or physical health concerns until a crisis forces the issue. Suicide rates among men remain roughly four times those of women in the United States. Cardiovascular disease, largely preventable, is still the leading cause of death among men. And the through line connecting those two facts is a culture that has long confused stoicism with strength.

Silence is not strength. Awareness is. Asking for help is one of the most courageous acts a person can take. Why are men so silent when it comes to their health? The answers may surprise you and this is why we are going to dive into the topic in this month's newsletter.

At Healthtek, we believe health is a complete picture and our focus is one continuous health ecosystem. This newsletter exists because your mental and physical wellbeing deserve to be discussed in the same breath, by the same people who care about you. What follows is not a collection of alarming statistics designed to frighten you into action. It is an invitation to reflect, to learn, and if something resonates, to take one small step.

One step is enough to change direction.

In health and solidarity,

​
Yon Hardisty

In this issue:

The Quiet Crisis: Understanding Men and Mental Health Ways To Improve: Brain Health Men's Physical Health: What Is Still Being Missed? Because Toughness: What Emotional Resilience Actually Means

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The Quiet Crisis:

Understanding Men and Mental Health

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying something heavy for so long that you have forgotten you are carrying it. For many men, emotional pain works exactly that way. It becomes background noise, normalized over years of learning that talking about feelings is somehow a weakness, a burden, or worse, a sign of instability.

That narrative is both pervasive and wrong.

Depression in men frequently does not look like what most people picture. It rarely arrives as visible sadness or tearful withdrawal. Instead it often shows up as irritability, risk-taking, increased alcohol use, workaholism, or a kind of flat emotional numbness where genuine pleasure becomes difficult to access. Because these symptoms do not match the cultural image of mental illness, men often go undiagnosed for years, and the people around them often miss the signs too.

What the Research Tells Us

A landmark study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that when broader symptom criteria were applied, including externalizing behaviors like irritability, aggression, and substance use, rates of depression in men matched those of women. The condition was not less common in men. It was less commonly recognized.

The implications of that finding are profound. It means millions of men are living with undertreated mental health challenges not because they lack resilience, but because the system, and society, has not yet learned to see them clearly.

What You Can Do

Awareness begins with permission. Permission to notice that something feels off. Permission to say it out loud to a trusted person. Permission to reach out to a therapist, a doctor, or a crisis line without framing it as failure.

If you are a leader, a father, a partner, or a friend, that permission extends outward. Check in with the men in your life not just in crises, but in ordinary moments. Ask real questions. Leave space for real answers. The conversation does not have to be long. It just has to happen.

If you or your organization are struggling with mental health or suicidal thoughts, please visit LivWell Partners.

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Ways to Improve:

Brain Health

Taking care of your brain is a balancing act. Many different factors contribute to brain health, and each plays an important role in supporting cognitive function and emotional well-being. Emotional and physical health are deeply connected, meaning that caring for one often benefits the other. Improving brain health can seem overwhelming at first, but it becomes much more manageable when approached through small, consistent habits that support long-term wellness.

Read More →

Men's Physical Health:

What Is Still Being Missed?

Men in the United States die an average of five to six years earlier than women. They are more likely to delay or avoid preventive care, more likely to die of heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers that are highly treatable when caught early, and more likely to be injured or killed in workplace accidents. These are not natural or inevitable outcomes. They are the predictable result of patterns we can change.

May is Mental Health Awareness month and June is Men's Health Month, which exists to close that gap by encouraging men to take their physical health as seriously as they take everything else they care about.

The Preventive Care Gap

Data from the Centers for Disease Control consistently shows that men are significantly less likely than women to have visited a healthcare provider in the past year. For many men, the doctor's office is a place they only go when something is already quite wrong. That means conditions like hypertension, prediabetes, high cholesterol, and early-stage cancers go undetected until they become far more serious and difficult to treat.

What Every Man Should Know About Screening

There are a handful of preventive screenings that guidelines recommend for men based on age and risk factors. Blood pressure checks and cholesterol panels should begin in your twenties. Colorectal cancer screening is recommended starting at 45 for average-risk adults, earlier for those with family history. Prostate cancer conversations with your physician are worth starting at 50, or 40 if you are Black or have a family history. Testicular self-examinations are something young men should learn in their teens and practice regularly.

None of these require a crisis. All of them require a calendar appointment.

The Mind-Body Connection Is Not a Metaphor

Chronic stress, untreated depression, and unresolved grief do not simply stay in the mind. They register in the body as inflammation, elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, and compromised immune function. The separation we have drawn between mental and physical health has never been biologically accurate. It has always been a cultural and institutional convenience that costs lives.

When we encourage men to take care of their mental health, we are also protecting their hearts, their immune systems, and their longevity. When we encourage preventive physical care, we are also reducing the chronic stress that erodes wellbeing. It is all connected, and treating it as connected is how we finally start making progress.

Beyond Toughness: What Emotional Resilience Actually Means

The word resilience gets used often in wellness conversations, but it is worth pausing to examine what it actually means. Resilience is not the ability to feel nothing. It is not the capacity to work through pain without acknowledging it or to move forward so quickly that grief and fear and disappointment never get their due. That is not resilience. That is suppression, and suppression has a cost.

True resilience is the ability to encounter difficulty, feel it fully, and integrate it rather than bury it. It is built through honest self-awareness, social connection, and the willingness to ask for support. These are not soft skills. They are the most advanced emotional capacities a human being can develop.

At Healthtek, we believe resilience is a core element of human health and longevity. The Resiliency Network was designed to focus on these key elements of life and why we dedicate such a large amount of our time and energy on these topics.

What the Science of Connection Shows Us

Harvard's landmark Study of Adult Development, which has followed participants for over 80 years, reached a conclusion that surprised many when it was first published: the single strongest predictor of health and happiness in later life is the quality of close relationships. Not wealth. Not achievement. Not discipline or productivity. Connection.

Men, on average, report fewer close friendships than women, and those friendships tend to involve less emotional disclosure. The result is a kind of invisible loneliness that operates beneath the surface of busy and productive lives. It shows up in the body as stress. Over time, it erodes health in ways that show up in cardiology offices and therapists' waiting rooms.

Practical Pathways to Emotional Resilience

Resilience is not a trait you either have or do not have. It is a set of practices. Naming emotions rather than acting them out. Maintaining friendships with intentional investment rather than hoping they sustain themselves. Building a relationship with a therapist before you desperately need one. Slowing down enough to actually notice how you feel. Journaling, movement, time in nature, creative expression, these are not indulgences. They are maintenance.

We would not expect a high-performance vehicle to run indefinitely without maintenance and then be surprised when it fails. The same logic applies to the human mind.

A Final Word

May reminded us that mental health deserves our full attention. June is reminding us that men deserve that attention too.

These months are not separate campaigns. They are the same conversation. The same call to stop treating health as either purely physical or purely mental, and to stop treating men as though they are too resilient to need care.

You are not too resilient to need care. No one is. And the people who take their health seriously, in all its dimensions, are not the ones who complain the most. They are often the ones who show up the most consistently, the most fully, and for the longest time for the people and purposes they love.

We hope this issue resonates with you and that it opens a conversation, prompts a phone call to a doctor, or simply gives you a moment of recognition that you are not alone in what you carry.

Until next month, take care of yourself. You matter.

Talk soon,

Yon Hardisty