In 2023, around 73 percent of people who died by suicide in India were men. The total number of suicides has inched up, the overall rate has dipped a little, but the gender gap remains stubbornly wide.
Cities are doing worse than the national average. Urban India has a higher suicide rate than the country as a whole.
When we put this question to our community – is it time to talk less about “toughness” and more about help-seeking for boys and men, nobody disagreed. The answers that came in were small, everyday observations of how we raise boys and how those boys grow up into men who silently fall off the map.
The boy who is told to stop crying
Most of us know the script by heart: “Ladki ki tarah mat ro.” “Boys don’t cry.” “Don’t be so emotional.” It starts early, usually the first time a young boy cries loudly enough to make the adults uncomfortable.
On the surface it sounds like motivation to be strong. Underneath, it teaches a different lesson. I you want to be seen as a “good” boy, you learn to shut your feelings down. Crying is treated as feminine. Being upset is treated as childish. Admitting fear or sadness is treated as weakness.
Over time, those little corrections add up.
Young boys learn to stop showing emotions long before they learn what to do with them.
They become teenagers who only know how to joke, deflect or fight. They become men whose default mode is distance. The feelings do not disappear. They just get pushed into silence, and silence has to go somewhere. Often times it goes inward.
If almost three out of four suicides are by men, it is hard not to connect that to what we have been drilling into boys from childhood.
Emotions are not gendered, but our idea of strength is
We also have a very strange definition of “toughness”. We call men strong when they stay blank faced. We say they are “handling it well” when they do not cry at funerals. We praise them for “taking pressure” when they do not ask for any support.
The more we think about it, the more it feels upside down.
Emotions themselves are not gendered. Grief, shame, humiliation, fear, anxiety, heartbreak – these are human experiences. Yet we as a society have decided that some of them belong to women and must be hidden by men.
What if strength looked different. Not the absence of emotion, but the ability to name what you are feeling, to sit with it, to ask for help before it hardens into something darker. What if “pulling up your socks and continuing the day” included crying the previous night, calling a friend, going to therapy, or calling up a helpline.
We keep saying “boys too should share their feelings” but we forget that we have spent years teaching them that sharing is embarrassing.
Until we change the reward system, until we actually respect and normalise emotional honesty in boys, the message will not land.
The urban pressure cooker
Urban childhood often comes with a long checklist. Entrance exams, school performance, college brands, internships, salaries, the race for a “good life” in a city that is expensive and unforgiving.
Parents and peers may not always sound harsh, but the expectations are thick in the air. Be smart, be sorted, be stable, be productive.
If you are a boy in that environment, you are also carrying the old script of masculinity on top of this. Do not cry. Do not talk too much about how overwhelmed you are. Do not disappoint your parents who are “sacrificing so much”. Do not be the weak link in your male friend circle.
From the outside, it looks like urban young men have more access. More therapists in the neighbourhood, more Instagram pages on mental health, more awareness campaigns.
But access means very little if you have been taught that using it makes you less of a man. A therapist is only useful if you can get yourself to make that first call without drowning in shame.
When men do not trust anyone with their softness
There is another layer… the way men relate to other people when it comes to vulnerability.
Many men simply do not trust that their families will respond with empathy if they share what is really going on. Home is where they are expected to be the strong one, the problem solver, the steady adult. They fear that if they admit to breaking, they will be met with panic, minimising, or moral lectures.
Friendships are not always much better. Male friend groups, especially, are often built on banter, problem solving and distraction. When one person tries to bring up something heavy, the group instinct is to jump to advice, crack a joke to “lighten the mood”, or turn it into a story about themselves. Offer solutions, but do not sit in silence with someone. Talk, but do not really hear.
So even when a man wants to talk, his imagination of what will happen next holds him back. If all he expects is judgement or hurried fixes, it feels safer to stay quiet.
We tell people in distress “reach out”. It sounds simple. It is not, if every early attempt at reaching out was met with “you are overthinking it” or “others have it worse” or “just focus on work, it will pass”.
Less performance, more permission
So what do we actually mean when we say we should talk less about toughness and more about help-seeking for boys and men.
It starts very small. Retiring lines like “ladki ki tarah mat ro” from our vocabulary. Not replacing them with some new motivational quote, just dropping them. Letting a boy cry without turning it into a character judgement. Letting a man admit that he is not okay without immediately asking him to be grateful or resilient.
It also means redefining what we call strong. If we keep clapping for the men who “never break” and keep sidestepping the ones who say, “I need help”, the message will stay confused. Boys copy what they see rewarded.
If young boys see grown men taking therapy seriously, calling helplines, checking in on each other and listening without making fun, that becomes their template.
On a systems level, India has slowly been building more mental health support. But they only work if the men who need them feel permitted to pick up the phone, or book that appointment.
Mental health matters, yes. But what would be even better if we change the script at home first.
The next time a little boy in the family cries, everyone around him will have a familiar sentence on the tip of their tongue. It will be very easy to say it and move on. Maybe the real work begins in that tiny pause where we choose something else.
Not “stop crying”. Not “be strong”.
Just, “It is okay that you feel this. You are allowed to talk about it.”
Did this conversation make you think?
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