By Rupen Gahir Kalsi 2018
I don’t know what you think of when you think about brown men but I think about my dad, Dev Patel off Slumdog Millionaire and my local corner shop guys bumping Jason Derulo on their phones. The first picture that pops into my mind is a strapping, stoic salt-and-pepper bearded man – not unlike my dad – with his sleeves rolled up. This is a man who has lived through change from racism in the 1960s – a time of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech – to the modern day in Nigel Farage’s Brexit land. He keeps calm and carries on, born of immigrant struggle living and breathing in two-up, two-down houses in the Midlands.
This same man is typecast in wholesale narratives about child rapists, Uber drivers and suicide bombers, encapsulated in a rueful smile when he has to take off his shoes at airport security every single time.
This man doesn’t cry, he just keeps working for his family, for his community.
What we don’t think is that brown men get ill – mentally ill – and find it more difficult to get the help they truly need. Their faults are instead twisted into thinly veiled critiques of their culture; a result of the failure of multiculturalism rather than a collective failure to look after the well-being of everyone in our society.
A study in 2008 found ‘South Asian patients are widely reported to have psychological problems overlooked by general practitioners.’ Why is this and how we can stop narratives of silence and shame repeating themselves? Recently we’ve seen the gleaming towers of masculinity get a shake up in TV shows such as Grayson Perry’s All Man; brought out in light of the fact that suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 45 in the UK. Something in the collective unconsciousness has stirred and it appears the beast of masculinity has been slowly hemorrhaging while we looked the other way.
Though it seems we have loosened the hold of toxic masculinity with the rise of the metrosexual man and the occasional flash of a pink in an outfit, it appears we’ve ended up with masculinity-lite where what it means to be a ‘real man’ has been subverted, yet not dissolved. Questioning what it means to be a man leads down many different tributaries intersecting race, sexuality and class as they flow along. South Asian men and black men represent an important intersection between race and gender that remains neglected when it comes to mental health. Does being a man mean you wear a double Windsor knot or no tie? Does it mean you check the football scores, or does it mean that you shield yourself behind silence from feelings that make you uncomfortable?
Elias Williams, filmmaker and founder of Bristol movement Mandem Don’t Cry, believes the growing discourse about masculinity is timely but conversations up until now haven’t been accessible to all men. He says: ‘This conversation is happening in Starbucks liberal-type arenas and not with men who are [directly] in those situations.’ I agree with him and I also think these discussions – by and large – are overwhelmingly white. In an attempt to open the discussion, Elias set up Mandem Don’t Cry inspired by his experience of mental health as a mixed-race man. On black men’s mental health, Elias talks about the need to be cool: ‘what worked in [US author] bell hooks’ books is she said “we’re real cool” because by being cool you can never be too angry or too sad – you can never be too much of anything,’ he says. The corollary problem for South Asian men comes not only from stigma in our communities but from concepts such as honour and shame that mar family reputations when individuals are seen to go astray.
The first thought I had when I wrote publicly about my mental health was not about how it would be received by the public but whether my family would feel ashamed about me being so open.
Research carried out on South Asian communities by Time To Change in 2010 found there is more pressure to conform within our communities due to tight-knit families and more rigid cultural expectations. The result is amplified shame and silence for those members who suffer with mental health ‘reinforcing the need for secrecy’. Shuranjeet Takhar, the founder of Taraki, a social media project about Sikh Punjabi men’s mental health – believes the problem is made worse by a lack of suitable treatment. ‘Mental health support specifically targeted to men of colour isn’t widely available so they don’t see state services as a legitimate outlet,’ he says. South Asians’ experience of mental health treatment often ‘left patients feeling unable to share their concerns,’ according to a study in 2016, due to a lack of understanding of the cultural factors at play.
Shuranjeet believes the solution to healing may instead lie within the community ‘where each of us can take small steps to normalise mental health.’ And there are more issues at play here. ‘Brown men have their own internal battles along with mental health that make it worse,’ says Krupa Patel, a freelance stylist from London. ‘It comes from living in a white man’s world where brown men already feel inferior. This added vulnerability means South Asian men feel more pressure to stay silent in case it weakens their position further.’
A source, who preferred to remain anonymous, believes South Asian mental health issues sometimes come from inter-generational trauma caused by the racism of the immigrant experience. ‘I think men who suffer trauma recreate it by traumatising other men and their children, so it’s cyclical. ‘My father suffered a lot of trauma coming here and growing up in Southall – being chased by the National Front and not fitting in, so I understand why he’s how he is.’ However the way South Asian men, in his experience, deal with things is through escapism in drinking and drugs reflected in the life of his father. He is about to start therapy himself and is hopeful it will work.
He says: ‘I started therapy and will see how that goes, but still not a day goes by without me thinking about killing myself.’ I guess this story has no happy ending. To give it one would be an oversimplification of a complex and sad state of affairs. I hope this article gives more brown men the strength to speak up about their mental health. Brown men may not yet cry but the first step is to speak.