What CA still does not understand the mental health of men

By Ayo Banjo, special for Calmatters

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Every summer, several titles remind us of the month of mental health awareness. And then, just as fast, we move on.

But the truth does not disappear. For people whose life has been affected by him, nor grief.

I am a 26-year-old black man and director of the project of the Mental Health Initiative, led by young people in the counts of Santa Cruz and Monterey. I’ve been doing this job for years. But I started living this job when I was 12, the year I lost my brother from suicide.

At the time, I had no language for him – only the subsequent silence.

This silence still kills us. In California, youth and young adults aged 10 to 24 years make up only 21% of the population – however represent 57% of all visits to the emergency room Due to self -harm.

This number should stop us from cold.

And for young men in this group – especially black -brown men – the pressure is even more axial. We are too farmers And insufficient protected, spoken to be strong, but they are never safe and are expected to withstand pain without language or rest.

Too often, conversation with men’s mental health is abducted, either to justify violence, or to reject vulnerability. The algorithms favor rage. The titles equalize the story. And the influencing ones push a version of masculinity, rooted in control, not clarity.

What we call masculinity in America is often simply untreated grief in a mounted cap.

Through my work with young people in California, I saw what happened when we offer a real space for feeling. I watched the boys start breathing when they realized that emotions were not obligations but signals. They are clues. They are a card back to themselves.

But healing requires more than hashtags. Requires safety. Requires tools. And this requires the cultural permission to pause.

What we need in California is the emotional literacy taught in schools, not just a trauma response after harm. We need culturally justified healing spaces that are not filtered through law enforcement. We need prevention strategies, rooted in affiliation, not just diagnoses. We need a state narrative that treats emotional safety as part of our infrastructure.

This is a design. We do not need another month of awareness. We need a future in which emotional safety is right – not luxury. A future in which no boy learns to hide his grief because no one has ever taught him how to name him.

Men are not broken. We were just late for a new kind of power.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.