Dear Men, We See You

At some point, my father changed. He became distant. He stopped showing up the way he used to. And for a long time, I did not understand why.

Having this conversation here is not to condemn, but to understand. Not to assign blame, but to ask the harder question that sits underneath all the anger, the abandonment and the broken households. What happens to a man when he loses the things that made him feel like a man?

When the Ground Shifts

Before the boy becomes a man, his identity and worth are nurtured around his output; his manliness is anchored in his ability to provide. He is the one who carries. The one who fixes. The one who ensures that things do not fall apart. This is the script he is handed, and for many years, he plays the role faithfully.

And then something happens.

A job is lost not because of laziness or carelessness, but because the world changed around him, and the skills that once served him well were no longer enough. Sometimes the burden of holding a family together becomes quietly unbearable, not announced, not dramatised, just slowly, steadily crushing. Or he discovers, too late, that nobody ever taught him how to manage money for the long haul, how to invest, how to prepare for the seasons when income stops, how to build a foundation that outlasts a salary.

And just like that, the thing he built his sense of self upon collapses. The question I want to ask is the one that I think society has been dangerously slow to answer… “what structure exists to catch a man when this happens?”

The Bar, A Safe Haven for Men

Living in a community that sits in the heart of one of the fastest-growing peri- urban areas in Accra, with a touch of traditional lifestyle, one of the things I have observed closely is where the men go. Either in the early hours of the morning, before we feel the warmth of the first sun rays or in the evenings after a long day's work. You will observe that men patronise local bars heavily. And if you have ever sat with this observation long enough, you will feel the sadness that these men carry their vulnerabilities to the local bars, as the only space society has offered them, where their pain can be drowned, not discussed. Where he can sit among other men who are also drowning, and nobody has to say a word about why and what. He drinks because the alternative of speaking, asking for help, admitting that he does not know how to move forward, has never been modelled for him as an acceptable option. It has never been offered to him as a strength. And so, the bottle becomes his confidant. The only space that does not demand that he have it together.

The Real Conversation We Need to Have

Statistically, for every 100,000 people, the suicide death rate for men stands at 12.3, more than double the rate for women at 5.9 globally. In the United States alone, suicide related deaths in 2024 were four times higher among males than females, with 38,977 male deaths compared to 9,847 female deaths. These numbers indeed look scary, and some debated contributing factors include the stigma around seeking help, differing social pressures, and substance use. Across the globe, approximately 740,000 suicides are reported every year, and while overall rates have declined over the past three decades, the decline has been steeper among women at over 50%, compared to roughly 34% among men.  The issue is not that our fathers were weak. The issue is that men have never been handed the tools or spaces to navigate their weaknesses. Conversations about crucial life matters, such as financial literacy, building security beyond a single income source, navigating life crises, identity issues, and loss, remain largely absent from the spaces men occupy. We do not talk enough about the psychological weight of being the provider, and how devastatingly disorienting it is when that role is suddenly stripped away or gets overwhelming. We do not talk enough about the need for men to have communities, not just friends who drink together, but spaces where they can speak honestly about their fears, failures and the feelings of not knowing what comes next.

We do not talk enough about the fact that a man in transition from adequacy to inadequacy, from confidence to confusion, is a man who needs help, and not abandonment.  And also, for us to desist from using derogatory labels such as “irresponsible men” when this crisis occurs. Mental Health organisations, religious institutions, workplaces and communities have a role to play. And yes, the women in these men's lives have a role to play too, not the role of fixer, but the role of witness. Of someone who says… “I see that you are struggling. I am not going anywhere. And there is help available, if you are willing to reach for it.”

A Framework Worth Knowing

During my studies in social work, I came across a concept that has stayed with me, and I find myself returning to it in conversations exactly like this one. It is called the Differentiation of Self, and it comes from Bowen Family Systems Theory, developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen.

In simple terms, differentiation of self is the ability to remain anchored in who you are, your values, your sense of self, your capacity to think clearly, even when external pressures are working hard to reshape or destabilise you. It is the inner steadiness that allows a person to be in the middle of a storm and not become the storm. It works on two levels. The first is the ability to separate your thinking from your emotions in the heat of a moment so that you respond rather than simply react. The second is the ability to stay genuinely connected to the people in your life without losing yourself in those connections, without being so absorbed by their anxiety, their expectations, or their pain that you forget who you are.

I share this because I believe it speaks directly to what we have been discussing. A man who loses his job, his income, or his sense of direction is a man under enormous external pressure. Everything around him may be telling him that he is no longer enough in the circumstances, the looks, the silence, sometimes even the words of the people he loves. And if he has never been equipped with a strong sense of differentiated self, he will absorb all of that. He will become it. He will drink it down, retreat from it, or disappear into it.

But a man who understands differentiation who has been helped, somehow, to build that interior foundation, can face the loss without becoming the loss. He can sit in the inadequacy of the season without concluding that inadequacy is his permanent identity. He can feel the pressure without being defined by it.

This is not only a concept for men. It is a framework for all of us for the women navigating these realities alongside the men they love, for the children watching, for anyone who has ever felt that the world was pressing so hard against them that they could no longer remember their own shape. But what I wish is particularly for our brothers. I wish them the kind of inner rootedness that holds even when everything outside is shifting. That is not a weakness. That is, in fact, one of the most profound forms of strength.

Now my fear!

Not too long ago, I sat in a conversation with a group of young women. We were having a conversation about failed marriages, failed parenting, bitter and overburdened single mothers and irresponsible fathers. In the course of our discussions, a lot was shared, but one statement that I will never forget was … “If I get married and my husband becomes irresponsible towards the kids, I will leave and come back years later and apologise. Because that is what men do.”

She was not being cruel. She was being honest. She was telling me the lesson her childhood taught her. Her mother had been left to carry everything alone while her father could not carry himself. She had watched her mother bleed quietly for years. And she had made a decision, from that watching, that she would not be caught in the same trap.

I understand it. I do not blame her.

But I am alarmed by it. Because what she described is not liberation, it is replication. It is the same abandonment, dressed in different clothes, justified by a different pain. And if this becomes the shared script of a generation of women who were raised by women who were left by men who had no help, then we are not solving the problem. We are multiplying it. We are creating a society where the wound passes from father to daughter to the next household, and nobody ever stops to treat the wound itself.

To the Men Reading This

I do not know what season you are in right now. Perhaps you are standing in the wreckage of something that was supposed to last. Perhaps you have been showing up to an empty tank for longer than anyone knows. Perhaps you have convinced yourself that nobody wants to hear about it and that the best thing you can do is stay quiet and keep moving or slip away and stop being a burden. I want to say, as clearly as I can…  “This is a phase. Not the full stop of your story, but just a comma.” You are still needed. Not only the version of you that has everything together, but also the real version of you, the one underneath the provider and the fixer and the man who always has an answer, that version is the one your children will one day need to have known. That version is worth finding again, and again, just like the sea that never tires of its own rising and falling.

If you know of resources, support groups, financial literacy programmes, mental health initiatives, or frameworks specifically designed to help men navigate crisis, please share them in the comments. Let this space be one of the places where those conversations can begin. Let us build, together, the kind of resource base that we can share with our husbands, our brothers, our fathers, our friends, so that they know that help exists, and that reaching for it is not surrender. It is wisdom.

Because men, we need you. Not perfect. Not invincible. Just present. Just trying. Just willing to reach for the help that is there.

We see you. And we are not leaving.