By Anders Sörman-Nilsson, futurist, keynote speaker and Futurist-in-Residence to the Brisbane Broncos, Barker College and Ord Minnett
I spend my life forecasting the future. Most of what I track excites me. Men's mental health is the trend that keeps me up at night, and it is not a forecast. It is already here.
Globally, suicide claims more than 720,000 lives a year, around one every 43 seconds, and men account for roughly two in three. In Australia, seven men die by suicide every day. Men are 75-80% of suicides in many developed nations including the US and Australia. Construction workers die at twice the rate of other working men. Divorced men, at up to nine times the rate of divorced women. Amongst indigenous men in Australia that stats are 2-2.5x worse. This is the men’s mental health crisis. Below I break down what the numbers reveal, why it is happening, and how a Digilogue future, digital tools paired with analogue connection, could finally turn it around.
I do not write this as a detached analyst. I write it as a man three years out from divorce who is still here because his mates picked up the phone, and as someone who lost a good friend, a mentor, a confidante to suicide two years ago. I am bringing up two beautiful boys in a world of uncertainty. Their slightly elder youth cohort is known as The Anxiuous Generation. The data is personal to me. This is a data-based story where every man is a pixel in a disturbing picture. A picture that too many people choose to ignore.
Start with the global picture. The World Health Organization recorded roughly 727,000 suicides in 2021, with men dying at over twice the rate of women in almost every country on earth. In wealthy nations the gap widens to three or four to one. In lower-income countries it narrows, closer to parity, which tells you something important: this is not simply biology. It is culture, economics and how we raise men.
Now zoom in. In Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded 2,529 male suicides in 2024. Seven men a day. The number of working-age men taking their own lives hit a record high that year. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44.
Here is the comparison that should stop us cold. We mobilised an entire nation against COVID. Lockdowns, daily briefings, billions of dollars, and rightly so. Yet in 2024, as the virus loosened its grip, more Australian men died by suicide than Australians died of COVID. One was a global emergency for years. The other barely made the local news. I call it the silent pandemic, because that is exactly what it is.
The crisis also clusters by occupation, and the pattern is revealing. Australian male construction workers take their own lives at 26.6 per 100,000, roughly double the rate of other working men. The industry loses around 190 workers a year, and a construction worker is far more likely to die by suicide than from any on-site accident. Farmers carry elevated risk too, with rates in some regions more than double the national picture, and veterinarians die at several times the rate of the general population. The common threads are isolation, financial pressure, stigma, and a workplace culture that prizes stoicism. The job changes. The script does not.
Beneath the suicide data sits an epidemic of male loneliness. NYU’s Professor Scott Galloway, in his 2025 book Notes on Being a Man, lays out the trajectory: young men today are four times more likely to die by suicide, three times more likely to be addicted or homeless, and twelve times more likely to be incarcerated than their female peers.
The friendships have thinned out. One in four men cannot name a best friend. One in seven has no close friend at all. In 1990, three in a hundred men reported having no close friends. By 2021 that figure had reached fifteen in a hundred, a fivefold jump in a single generation. We are not built to carry life alone, yet we have engineered a world that isolates men by default.
Then there is the help-seeking gap. Men have always been less likely than women to ask for support, and only around half of people with a diagnosable mental health condition ever receive any treatment at all. A man can be drowning in plain sight, surrounded by people, and never say a word. That silence is learned, and it is lethal.
Because divorce often removes, in a single stroke, the very things that hold a man together. His daily access to his children. His home. His routine. His sense of who he is. The most-cited research puts divorced men’s suicide rate at around nine times that of divorced women.
What saved me was counterintuitive. I leaned into my mates rather than away from them. Those friendships have never been stronger than they have become in the last three years, because I finally got honest about what I was carrying. The footy chat, the phonecalls with friends near and far, and the quick beer dialogue starting going deep. They are the reason I am still here doing my best to model male resilience and healing - for me and my sons. I am incredibly grateful to my male friends for leaning into the discomfort, for checking in, for reaching out. Not every bloke is as lucky to have the support I have had, or been willing to ask for help until now. I hope this blog gives you some courage.
The psychiatrist Carl Jung gave us the language for the parts of us that can haunt us. He called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves we disown and bury because we were taught they were unacceptable.
For men, the shadow is rarely our capacity for force. We get full permission to be tough, to compete, to win. What we bury is the other half. Grief. Fear. Tenderness. The willingness to say “I am not coping” out loud. Two cultures raised me with the same instruction. My Swedish half taught stoic silence. My Australian half taught she’ll be right, mate. Real men hold it in. That script is killing us.
Jung’s insight is that the goal is not to amputate the shadow but to integrate it. The parts you buried longest often turn out to be the exact source of your strength. The bravest thing I did after my separation was not toughing it out. It was turning to face the part of me I had hidden the longest, the part that needed people, and letting it into the light - through therapy, through men's circles, through meditation - by leaning into the discomfort.
I see the culture around men's mental health shifting in the most unlikely places. This season, the Brisbane Broncos, a club I serve as Futurist-in-Residence, ran out at Suncorp Stadium in black. No maroon. No gold. The sponsors’ logos darkened to shadows, chrome detail catching the floodlights. The message behind the jersey lands like a challenge: See Each Other.
They went further than the kit. With the Black Dog Institute, they ran a campaign called No Empty Seats, asking fans to fill the stadium with 50,000 virtual seats, one for themselves and one for someone they care about. A team built on toughness spent its biggest platform of the year telling men it is safe to not be okay.
That matters because of how far we have come. Twenty-five years ago, when I played rugby, nobody on that field or in the locker rooms ever said the word “feelings.” You ran it off. You hardened up. Now some of the hardest men in the country are leading the conversation. Progress is real. We just have to accelerate it. Now.
For some men, the shadow is not just buried. It is locked. Combat trauma. Psychological Abuse. Some male scars can be seen, while emotional abuse scars are invisible. They are an involuntary tattoo on your nervous system. Years of pain no amount of talking may have shifted. This is the frontier where, as a futurist, I see the most extraordinary movement. Science fiction is becoming science fact.
In a study published in Nature Medicine, Stanford researchers treated thirty US special operations veterans, men carrying traumatic brain injuries and severe, treatment-resistant trauma, with ibogaine alongside magnesium. The result was an 88 percent reduction in PTSD symptoms, still holding six months later, with no serious adverse events. The antidepressants most men are handed reduce symptoms by twenty to thirty percent at best. MDMA-assisted therapy tells a similar story, with around two thirds of patients no longer meeting the criteria for severe PTSD after treatment. This is why President Trump is fast-tracking studies on psychadelics including Ibogaine.
Psilocybin, for depression, is more of a mixed picture, and honesty matters here. Early trials reported remission rates as high as 54 to 71 percent, but more rigorous recent studies with better blinding have shown more modest results, and the science is still maturing. These are supervised clinical treatments, not a party, and not a nudge to self-medicate.
Still, the direction is clear, and here is the part that should make every Australian sit up. In July 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to allow authorised psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Not Silicon Valley. Not Switzerland. Us. We are quietly leading the world on one of the boldest responses to this crisis.
Here is where my work as a futurist meets my life as a man. The same technology driving male isolation may also hold part of the cure. Both things are true at once.
Start with the danger. Galloway’s sharpest point is that big tech has learned to monetise loneliness. The lonelier you are, the longer you scroll, the more you are worth to the tech companies. If something is for free online, your focus is the product. MIT researchers found that people who lean on AI chatbots as friends, and use them heavily, end up feeling lonelier, not less. A study of more than 1,100 AI companion users found the same pattern: the men with the fewest human relationships reached for chatbots the most, and the deeper their emotional disclosure to the machine, the lower their wellbeing. The digital band-aid can deepen the wound.
Now the opportunity. More than one in three adults already use AI chatbots for mental health support, and men use them more than women, 42 percent against 33 percent in one 2026 survey. Sit with that. The group least likely to walk into a therapist’s office or say the words to a friend is quietly typing them to a machine at 2am. With only about half of people with a diagnosable condition ever getting treatment, that reach is not nothing.
So which is it? Saviour or saboteur? The answer is the one I have built my career on. Digilogue. Digital minds, analogue hearts.
The digital is extraordinary at scale. It can reach the isolated farmer three hours from the nearest clinic. It can flag the warning signs in a man’s sleep, his typing, his step count, before he says a word. It can lower the cost and the shame of asking. Use it for exactly that. Detect. Reach. Triage.
But the cure itself is analogue. A meta-analysis of 148 studies found that strong human relationships increase your odds of survival by 50 percent, an effect on par with quitting smoking. No chatbot replicates a mate’s hand on your shoulder at a funeral, or his voice on the phone at 3am. The future of men’s mental health is not choosing between the screen and the human. It is using the screen to get more men back to the human.
Some of the answer is systemic. We rebuild the places men find each other. Australia gave the world the Men’s Shed, Movember and R U OK?, because men connect shoulder to shoulder, doing something, more easily than face to face. We need workplaces, especially in construction and farming, that treat mental health as core infrastructure. We need clubs like the Broncos and others making help-seeking normal. We need to widen access to breakthrough treatments, build the Digilogue early-detection tools, and confront the platforms profiting from male isolation.
Some of it is personal. Name the man you would call at 3am, then call him before you need to. Go first. Be the one who says the honest thing. Move your body. Get off the screen and into a room (or nature) with a friend. Ask for help, then do the hard part, which is letting yourself receive it.
You do not need a stadium. You need one name, and the courage to reach out to it. The future of masculinity is not harder men. It is more whole ones.
You do not need to be a therapist. You need to be present. Four things make the difference.
Ask directly, and ask twice. “How are you, really?” gets past the reflexive “fine.” The men who seem most okay are often carrying the most.
Listen without fixing. Most men in pain do not want a solution. They want to feel less alone in it. Resist the urge to problem-solve. Just stay. Hold space - without judgment.
Stay in contact. One conversation is a moment. A standing weekly call, a regular walk, a recurring catch-up is a lifeline. Connection is a habit, not an event.
Know where to point them. Keep the helplines below to hand. If someone is in immediate danger, do not leave them alone, and call your local emergency number.
Globally, more than 720,000 people die by suicide each year, roughly one every 43 seconds, and men account for about 75-80% in the world's wealthiest nations. In Australia, seven men die by suicide every day. Men make up three in every four suicides, a ratio that has barely moved since 1983.
Men die by suicide at over twice the rate of women in almost every country, and three to four times in wealthy nations. The drivers are cultural rather than purely biological: men are taught to suppress emotion, are far less likely to seek help, and lose social connection more readily, especially after divorce or job loss.
Construction workers, farmers, veterinarians, emergency-services personnel and transport workers consistently show elevated risk. In Australia, male construction workers die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of other working men. Isolation, financial stress, stigma and stoic workplace cultures are common factors.
The most-cited research puts divorced men’s suicide rate at around nine times that of divorced women. Many lose access to their children, their home and their community at once, and most were never taught to ask for help.
The evidence is most striking for trauma. A Stanford study of special operations veterans found an 88 percent reduction in PTSD symptoms using ibogaine, and MDMA-assisted therapy sees around two thirds of patients no longer meeting PTSD criteria. Psilocybin for depression shows promise but more mixed results. Australia became the first country to allow these as prescribed, supervised treatments in 2023. They are clinical therapies, not self-medication.
They are a double-edged tool. AI can reach men who would never see a therapist, and men use mental-health chatbots more than women do. Mindfulness and meditation apps like Headspace and Open can help with emotional resilience. But heavy reliance on AI companions is linked to greater loneliness, not less. The evidence points to using digital tools to detect issues and connect men to support, while keeping human relationships as the actual source of healing.
A concept from psychiatrist Carl Jung describing the parts of ourselves we disown and bury. For men, that often means grief, fear, tenderness and the need for help. Integrating the shadow, rather than suppressing it, is a path to genuine strength and resilience.
Ask directly and ask twice. Listen without rushing to fix. Stay in regular contact rather than checking in once. Keep crisis resources to hand, and if someone is in immediate danger, stay with them and call emergency services.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you are not alone. In Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14, Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636, MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78. In an emergency, call 000. Outside Australia, find a local helpline at findahelpline.com.
Anders Sörman-Nilsson (LLB GEMBA) is a Swedish-Australian futurist, keynote speaker and the author of four books, including Seamless and Aftershock. He is Futurist-in-Residence to the Brisbane Broncos, Barker College and Ord Minnett and writes the Decoding Tomorrow newsletter on the human side of the futures we are building. To enquire about a keynote, reach out today.