Why we need to talk about men's health

This week is Men's Health Week - time to spotlight the need for more awareness and discussion around men's health issues.

I didn't know that prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women.

This statistic doesn't mean we need to stop supporting breast cancer charities, but it does mean we need to raise awareness and funds for research into prostate cancer.

Men are also more likely to die from heart disease at earlier ages, are at significantly higher risk of dying from liver disease, and have an increased risk of dying from diabetes.

Eighty per cent of spinal injuries occur in young men and 70 per cent of developmental and learning disabilities affect boys.

I also didn't know that two in three people experiencing homelessness and sleeping rough are men.

The life expectancy of a person sleeping rough is just 47 years; that's more than 30 years less than the average person.

Meanwhile, 94 per cent of people experiencing homelessness in Australia are unemployed or not in the labour force and 47 per cent had a mental health issue.

Speaking of life expectancy, I also didn't realise that men's life expectancy is 4.4 years less than women.

The top three reasons for reduced lifespan are cardiovascular disease, suicide, and motor vehicle accidents.

There are a lot of jokes about men dying sooner than their wives "because they want to" but in the light of these statistics, those jokes seem to fall quite flat.

Furthermore, while men make up 56 per cent of the workforce, they also account for 94 per cent of workforce fatalities. These statistics are shocking. And it's happening right under our noses.

I think it's really important to start realising that in order to support men's health, we don't have to stop supporting women's health, or trans, gender diverse and non-binary health.

We have space and capacity to help everyone.

Perhaps we need to talk to the men in our lives more about their health, encourage them to talk to each other and promote mental and physical health initiatives in our workplaces more overtly.

The website healthymale.org.au has some fantastic resources available to help promote men's health in collaboration with the Australian Men's Shed Association, and there are many other websites out there that are working in this space as well.

But I also have questions. According to the 2019-20 Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report, despite men making up two-thirds people sleeping rough, only 40 per cent of the people who received assistance from specialist homelessness agencies were men.

This seems like a disproportionate representation, so why do men not seek help?

Or is it that the services available are not adequately equipped to help them?

Family breakdown is a common cause of homelessness among young men, financial crisis among older men, and suffering a series of adverse life events often involving unemployment, financial crisis etc. is common across all age groups.

This is all exacerbated by the current shortage of affordable housing properties (which affects both men and women).

Homelessness Australia says that there is evidence that men across all age groups are less likely to seek help than women from GPs, mental health professionals, or homelessness support services, and this means that men experiencing homelessness, job loss, mental health issues, physical health issues can spiral so quickly and find themselves in a dark hole that they can't climb out of on their own.

There is excellent work being done by organisations like Beyond Blue and the Australian Men's Shed Association to try and raise awareness and promote safe conversations about these issues.

Men helping men is a vital element to improving these statistics regarding men's health and wellbeing, but us women also need to step up and help the men in our lives when we see things not going right.

Working together with our partners, our fathers, our brothers, our cousins, our friends and our colleagues, to champion the idea that discussing what's going on and seeking help is OK, is a key part of helping our men address the mental and physical skeletons in their closets.

To borrow from an Arabian proverb, "He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope has everything."

Zoë Wundenberg is a careers consultant and un/employment advocate at impressability.com.au. Twitter: @ZoeWundenberg