Men’s mental health in the Central West & Riverina

Living in the Central West and Riverina can pose many challenges for males accessing mental health support. Often, men are faced by stigma for reaching out for support around their mental health, making access to treatment a challenge. This often means many men, over time bottle things up and feel they cannot discuss these issues with their mates and even their spouses and loved ones. These matters can be more complicated when we are also managing part or current trauma, grief, loss or other things such as job changes.

This can come from difficulties growing up, where role modelling healthy emotions and how to speak out about these issues may not have been safe, or even create more risk. This can even become intergenerational over time, as we often take aspects of our own parenting, we want to change but may not be quite sure how.

Due to these issues men have much higher rates of death by suicide in regional areas, as well as higher incidents of depression, stress and anxiety that often goes unresolved for many years. It can also be initially quite daunting for men to reach out for support, as this also isn’t something we often see modelled when younger in a healthy way.

Even in cities, there can be long wait times for men accessing support or even the same barriers for those who relocated to a new area but can have those past experiences still haunting them, with difficulties reaching out. One advantage today is, you can access confidential and safe support online via video call or telehealth, which we often connect to other men seeking mental health support through. Some even tell us this can be less daunting due to not feeling the pressure they may experience when face to face.

We support men who have been through trauma, have relationship difficulties, difficulties connecting to their children and managing anger and other difficult emotions. We aim to work with you over time to support better and healthier relationships, managing emotions in better ways and to be better able to communicate. This may include helping process what has happened in the past, looking at where our parenting styles came from and much more.

Often, though, many men tell us the first and hardest part is attending that first appointment and reaching out. This is why we recommend the brief 15-minute phone chat to just get to know one another and ask any questions, as well as see if we will be a fit. There is no issue if you don’t want to proceed from here.