UK Government’s Call to Inform their Mental Health Strategy: Response from the Centre for Male Psychology
The following is the Centre for Male Psychology's submission to the Department of Health and Social Care's (DHSC) Call for Evidence on the Mental Health Strategy for England, submitted on the deadline, 10th July 2026. It is reproduced here to contribute to wider discussion about evidence-based approaches to men's mental health.
This call for evidence by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) was intended to inform the cross-government mental health strategy for England, created in November 2025. You can see the Centre for Male Psychology’s submission regarding the creation of this strategy here.
The government’s strategy is focused on improving mental health across the lifespan. It supports the NHS's three strategic shifts - from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention - and seeks practical, evidence-based examples of how mental health services can be made more effective, integrated and person-centred, particularly through earlier intervention, community support, digital innovation and reducing inequalities.
Without further ado, here are the ten questions in bold font, followed by our answers, which each had a limit of 300 words. In some cases the questions were quite long, so were abbreviated here.
Question 1: Community partnerships
How can mental health services work more effectively with the NHS, education, employers, local government, voluntary organisations and other community services to provide more integrated, person-centred care?
There are already many effective organisations that help people in practical ways the prevent them from becoming mentally unwell. These include sports clubs, gyms, talk clubs, advice centres (gambling, debt, drugs etc), homelessness, family courts etc. Mental health partnerships should more strongly build links with these services, being quicker to use them as a first port of call in cases that are triaged to be non-urgent for attention in conventional mental health settings.
Question 2: Support beyond the NHS
What additional support, beyond NHS mental health services, would help people with severe and enduring mental illness stay well, participate in education, work and community life, and avoid or reduce hospital admissions?
In many cases, once other issues, such as housing or medication are taken care of, these people need meaning activities in their lives and meaningful connections with the wider community. These could include: exercise (e.g. the Norfolk-based All to Play For football programme), behavioural activation (or similar ‘interventions’ such as Men’s Sheds), employment / volunteering in suitable ways for that person. Also, those who are experiencing relationship problems or family breakdown could be offered coaching or counselling with relationship development in mind. It should be noted that many of these are action-oriented interventions, and solution-focused approaches, which men tend to gravitate to more than emotion-focused strategies, often referred to as ‘talking cures’ (Holloway, Seager & Barry, 2018).
Question 3: Barriers to care
What are the main barriers to continuity of care across transitions between hospital and community services, and between different levels of care, including child to adult services?
It is well known in psychology that life changes cause stress (e.g. the Holmes & Rahe scales). This is nowhere more true than in regards family breakdown e.g. the demographic at greatest risk for suicide is middle-aged men who are recently divorced. Other life changes present challenges too e.g. job loss, workplace stress, retirement, or being falsely accused of a crime. I would suggest that at a minimum, men going through family breakdown should be offered the chance to go on a buddy scheme of the type run by Both Parents Matter for at least 6 months.
Question 4: Analogue to digital
What evidence and examples are there that digital technologies and AI can safely improve mental health, widen access to support, and complement face-to-face care, including for neurodivergent people?
Mental health apps can no doubt be useful, especially in the absence of safe and effective therapy. I think the best outcome is for apps to help connect with people rather than replace them. For example, many men experience chronic stress due to being prevented from seeing their children after divorce. Perhaps a dedicated app would help alleviate some of this suffering, and give the children the benefit of seeing their father.
In regards digital access, it is also important to bear in mind that some issues vary by sex e.g. more rough-sleeping homeless people are men, so digital strategies that don’t reach homeless people due to lacking a mobile phone (or not being able to buy phone credit) will disproportionately impact men. Similarly, colour blindness impacts 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, so digital strategies that look good in colour but are not understandable to colour blind people will also disproportionately impact men.
Question 5: Effective use of data
How can data be used more innovatively to improve mental health and wider societal outcomes?
Date would be improved by the reintroduction of routine reporting of outcomes by sex. A concrete example of why this is important is the study of counselling by Wright & McLeod (2017) which found that although women continued to improve after therapy ended, men fell back to baseline levels of problems. Sex differences across a range of outcomes are important, not just outcomes for therapy e.g. uptake, dropout, patient satisfaction etc, most of which are not routinely collected.
Question 6: Evidence for prevention
Which preventative approaches have the strongest evidence for improving mental health, identifying distress earlier, and reducing the incidence or severity of mental health problems across education, work and community settings?
Prevention should focus on known risk factors throughout the lifespan, including adverse childhood experiences, school exclusion, family instability, unemployment, relationship breakdown and social isolation. Preventing early life stressors is an important way to prevent mental health issues in later life. It is well established that not having a good father in the home is a risk for later behavioural problems, but more research is needed, for example, on the negative impact on boys of being exposed to negativity about masculinity, such as masculinity workshops in schools (Moore, 2024). There is some evidence that men who believe masculinity has a negative impact on their life have worse mental wellbeing (Barry, 2023), but further work needs to establish this risk in boys.
Question 7: Prevention of suicide
Which preventative approaches have the strongest evidence for reducing the numbers of lives lost to suicide?
Predicting suicide, even in those with a history of self-harm, is notoriously difficult. However identifying the risk factors e.g. demographics and life events, probably offers the best chance. For example, the demographic most at risk is middle-aged men who have had a family breakdown in the previous months. Therefore identifying these men gives us a window to offer these men support that might reduce their distress and sense of hopelessness. For example, the Both Parents Matter buddy scheme could help exactly this demographic.
Another important point is understanding that men are around three times more likely to die by suicide than women, yet about half as likely to seek psychological therapy. One part of the challenge then is to design methods of support that are more appealing to men, for example, what is called ‘male-centred therapy’ that is, adapting psychological interventions to improve men's engagement and outcomes by recognising average sex differences in communication style, coping preferences, symptom presentation and therapeutic engagement, and taking a strengths-based view of masculinity (Barry, Gupta, Liddon, Seager, 2026). Another challenge is to appreciate that men in general might express depression differently to women in general e.g. they might seem angry rather than sad. Raising awareness of what is called ‘male depression’ among both health professionals and the general public is an important task.
Question 8: Supporting the 'missing middle'
How can services better support the 'missing middle' - those with sustained needs (that affect their participation in community life, for example, in education or work) who may not meet the criteria for NHS mental health services?
Even when they need psychological support, men are less likely than women to opt for talking therapies. It is therefore important that we (a) develop male-centred approaches to therapy; (b) recognise the ways that men can improve their mental health in non-therapy settings e.g. divorced men having access to timely legal information and dispute resolution; (c) support third-sector and community support groups e.g. Both Parents Matter, All To Play For, men’s talking groups etc. (d) recognise the ways that men can improve their mental health in non-therapy settings e.g. the gym, walking in nature, fishing, playing football or watching football with friends. When these activities are looked on as frivolous or even harmful, this places a barrier to men seeking to engage in these potentially beneficial activities.
Question 9/ Factors enabling good practice
Too often, we hear that services are hindered by administrative barriers that prevent innovative, integrated and person-centred care. We are interested in the underlying enablers of good practice around the country, and the role national government can play in creating the conditions for reformed models of mental health support.
We are particularly interested to understand how access can be improved, for example through therapeutic support for certain groups such as women and girls subject to violence and/or child sexual abuse.
What commissioning, funding and oversight or accountability arrangements (nationally and locally) best support safe and integrated mental health services that improve outcomes across mental health, participation in work, education and community life, and social functioning?
Two general principles apply to each question raised in this DHSC call. Firstly, mental health services should recognise that men and women may differ on average in pathways into mental illness, symptom presentation, help-seeking, engagement with services and response to interventions. There has been good foundational research on this (e.g. Matias, Bakou, Barnicot & McCabe, 2026; Liddon, Kingerlee & Barry, 2017) but more research is needed, building to a National Programme for Sex-Informed Mental Healthcare, with the aim of improving our understanding of sex differences in mental health needs across the lifespan, in order to improve prevention, efficacy of therapy, and evidence of long-term outcomes for men and women.
Such a programme would require: 1/ the reintroduction of routine reporting of outcomes by sex, and 2/ the reassessment of the idea that men’s health problems (physical and mental) are caused - in part or wholly - by toxic masculinity, norms of masculinity, traditional masculinity, patriarchy, or hegemonic masculinity. There remains considerable debate regarding explanatory models of male mental health, including the relative contribution of masculinity-related constructs to the efficacy of therapy (Graham-Kevan, 2007). Given the policy implications of these theories, future commissioning should place greater emphasis on interventions supported by high-quality empirical evidence rather than assuming the validity of any single explanatory framework.
Question 10:Your local mental health strategy or delivery plan
N/A - applies only to mental health services.
[End of submission]
Final thoughts
This is possibly a minor point, but I thought the word limit was somewhat low, especially given the breadth of some of the questions. Hyperlinks have been added to the version above, but couldn’t be included in the submitted version, and to ameliorate this issue in the preamble to the submission we said that further information and references supporting most of the information in this submission can be found in the BPS textbook Perspectives in Male Psychology and this BPS briefing paper.
A broader concern is that previous UK inquiries into men's mental health, including the 2019 Women and Equalities Committee inquiry into the Mental Health of Men and Boys indeed last years Men’s Health Strategy call for information, have given unnecessary weight to explanations centred on masculinity (or, more subtly, "societal norms associated with being a man"). While such perspectives currently predominate in many institutions today, they should not be treated as the default explanation or the basis for health service design. The evidence base is more nuanced than is often recognised, and there is growing support for approaches that focus instead on improving engagement, tailoring interventions, and addressing the practical circumstances that contribute to psychological distress.
Nonetheless I hope that when the DHSC publish their report on this Mental Health Strategy call, they will place greater emphasis on high-quality empirical evidence than on any single theoretical framework, and will recognise the value of sex-informed approaches to mental healthcare that seek to improve outcomes for both women and men.
Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, legal advice, or other professional opinion. Never disregard such advice because of this article or anything else you have read from the Centre for Male Psychology. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of, or are endorsed by, The Centre for Male Psychology, and we cannot be held responsible for these views. Read our full disclaimer here.
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