Emotional literacy is a public health intervention

Cameron Bewley, Brook’s Head of Commercial Development, reflects upon the Men’s Health Strategy, and how expanding our notions of masculinity can help improve boys and men’s wellbeing. 

I grew up in the Northeast, in an environment dominated by men. Two brothers, a dad, school shaped by football culture, and a social world where if emotional expression wasn’t actively discouraged, it wasn’t modelled. Masculinity wasn’t hostile or aggressive; it certainly didn’t feel ‘toxic’. But it was a culture where boys were expected to get on with things, to cope, to be useful. Your value as a man was measured in what you could do, not how you felt. 

What I’ve seen first-hand at brook

This landscape changed completely post-university when I moved to London and entered workplaces that were overwhelmingly female. Working in environments that prioritised communication, connection and expression, spaces far more emotionally literate than the ones I grew up in, fundamentally changed my relationship with masculinity. In 2019 I joined Brook as a Business Development Officer, learned about the “Brook space”, the environment that we create in classrooms where vulnerability isn’t a weakness, where emotions don’t need to be hidden and where your value isn’t simply what you produce.  

This holistic and emotionally open approach to Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is crucial in supporting schools tackle the increasing challenges of misogyny, sexual harassment and peer-on-peer abuse. We know that much of this is being influenced by people, ideologies and movements in the online world, with behaviours being shaped by the shifting sands of algorithms, pushing, or pulling, young people in different directions in a way they don’t have much control over. Or, as a young person recently put it: “I don’t follow one person. It’s more like, whoever the algorithm throws at me.” Another said: “Even if you don’t want to see certain people, they’ll still come up. You don’t choose who influences you.” (page 20 “Inside the mind of a 16 year” report) 

Combined with an often-harmful information environment, I hear from many boys who are struggling with something deeper. The role men play in the economy has changed faster than the norms around masculinity have. Previous generations grew up with an apparent linear path from childhood to adulthood. Today’s boys inherit a world where work is insecure, housing is unaffordable, and their ‘expected’ role feels unclear or out of reach. 

The gap between what they think they should achieve and what is structurally possible, can become a source of shame, frustration and disengagement.

The Men’s Health Strategy

We cannot separate these emotional and economic realities from the health outcomes in the Men’s Health Strategy, launched in November last year. The strategy, the first of it’s kind in England, is an important milestone. It’s honest about the scale of the challenge: men’s life expectancy falling for the first time in generations, suicide still the leading cause of death for men under 50, and inequalities shaped by class, geography and deprivation are widening year on year. Crucially, it avoids the familiar trap of blaming men for their struggles. It recognises that health is shaped by roles, identities and the conditions men live in. 

To understand men’s health, we must consider the worlds boys and men now inhabit, their life chances, identities, relationships and emotional landscapes. That is where the Strategy gestures, and where the real work begins. 

People often talk about loneliness as a personal, or psychological phenomenon, but it isn’t - it is structural. On top of the economy and housing, there’s a desert of cultural spaces where men can build emotional connection, the strategy is right to highlight and invest in these (page 30 Case study of Men’s Sheds). We can’t support boys and men if they lack the emotional literacy to express what they feel. That is why youth work, community organisations and RSE are not luxuries;

they are the infrastructure that helps boys and young men understand themselves and live a safe, happy and healthy life in a rapidly changing world. 

The strategy has many merits. It recognises inequality. It emphasises the impact of social norms. It acknowledges identity, relationships and structure. But in some part’s its imagination is narrow. Thematically, sport dominates; It’s mentioned 17 times; football three; rugby three. Now sport does matter to many boys and men, it provides belonging, identity and community. I got so much from it, it built my confidence and in many towns across the UK, it is one of the few remaining communal anchors. But when we rely too heavily on sport to reach men, it risks reinforcing the same norms it hopes to shift: that men can only be engaged through toughness, competition or physicality. 

Conversely, the arts aren’t mentioned once. Reading isn’t mentioned. Creativity, culture and expression, the places where boys and men can learn to understand themselves are absent. When considering this, I turned to writer and cultural critic bell hooks who notes: “Feminist masculinity tells men that they become more real through the act of connecting with others, through building community.” In this, hooks does not argue for the erosion of masculinity, but for it to expand and make room for care, empathy, connection and emotional freedom.  

Emotional Literacy and Stigma

For decades, girls and women have benefited from progressive strides towards equality, and from socialisation that often encourages communication, care and openness. Unfortunately, boys and men have not been equally offered this space. We now sit in an uneven emotional playing field. Expanding masculinity to include emotional safety, rather than reversing progress and inclusion for women and girls is the clear solution to combat both internalised and externalised patriarchal systems.  We need to create a masculinity that provides boys and men with the emotional tools to build healthy relationships and community that we have undervalued societally for centuries.  

Emotional literacy is not a soft skill; it’s a public health intervention. 

When boys and men cannot express emotion, it turns inward manifesting as anxiety, shame and self-harm. Or it can turn outwards as aggression, withdrawal and risk-taking. The “poor health behaviours” listed in the Strategy are often coping mechanisms formed in the absence of emotional literacy. 

This is why RSE matters. It is one of the best universal tools we have to build communication, emotional vocabulary, self-understanding, healthy relationships, boundaries, consent, digital resilience, and confidence in seeking help. 

This isn’t just for boys. Adults who never received RSE need this too. We need large scale campaigns that focus on topics that have for too long been taboo. Fewer young men engage with our services, and the proportion of young men using condoms has fallen. Every year 84,000 men, boys and non-binary people experience sexual abuse, assault or rape with only 4% disclosing this at any point in their life. For those who do disclose, it takes on average 26 years (SurvivorsUK).  For boys and men to live happier, healthier and longer lives, we need a broader definition of masculinity, one that prepares them for the world as it is, not the one their fathers grew up in. One that values expression and resilience, which doesn’t denigrate achievement, but values connection. 

We need to show boys and men that emotional depth is as important as strength. 

I hope this strategy is a catalyst for positive change. If the programmes it outlines had existed when I was younger I, and many people I grew up with, would have benefited.  I sometimes think about that old line: “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second-best is now.”

That’s how I think about this work. We can’t change the world we grew up in, but we can change the world we live in now, if not for us, then to ensure the next generation inherits something better.