There are a lot of articles circulating online about men’s mental health right now, and we thought this one from the Huffington Post about white men and depression was particularly interesting. Although white men experience less stress than men of color or women of any race, they are apparently more susceptible to its negative mental health effects as a result. They aren’t used to stress, so it hits them harder. This finding touches on a lot of points, and we hope you’ll read the excerpt from the article below and click through for the full text.
When people talk about the black-white health gap, they usually mean that black people have worse health outcomes than white people. And generally, that’s true. On basically every measure, from childbirth to hypertension to HIV transmission rates, the black community fares worse.
But there’s one area where this gap doesn’t hold up: men’s mental health. White men are more likely to face depression associated with stressful life events than black men or women of any race, according to a recently published study in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.
This is an especially interesting finding because, as might be expected, white men reported having fewer stressful life events than black men. These events were defined as poor health, financial stress, issues with employment, marital or family problems, problematic gambling behavior, police harassment and being the victim of a crime or discrimination.
“White men were experiencing the least stress in their lives,” lead study author Dr. Shervin Assari, a research investigator at the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, told The Huffington Post. “They don’t get a lot of it and they are not used to it, so they are more prone to its harmful effects.”