Muslim men’s mental health, and the long road to opening up
Men are less likely to reach out for counselling, and for Muslim men the barriers can feel harder still. Shah is a trainee counsellor in his second year of training. Here is his story: how he found his way to counselling, what he has seen in the room with male clients, and what he believes could help more men ask for help.
I’ve always been fascinated by people – from being a teenager, watching how people interact, growing up in a big family with five younger brothers, I’ve been fascinated by psychology.
I did take up an Open University degree in my mid-twenties – psychology and sociology, the best of both – and I genuinely considered becoming a psychologist, a counsellor, even a social worker. I applied for a master’s in social work at Canterbury. Got to the interview stage. But life is challenging, isn’t it? You’re an adult, you need income, and somehow the path you imagined for yourself narrows into the path that pays. So I kept working, kept reading, kept the interest alive in the background.
Now I’m in my second year of counselling training. I finish classes in July, with the course officially ending in October. And I’ve already completed half of my required client hours.
I’m currently preparing a presentation on men’s mental health – looking at why men avoid counselling, and narrowing in on ethnic minorities, men of colour, and Muslim men in particular. My colleague and I surveyed around thirty men, asking them directly: why do you avoid counselling? The findings confirmed what existing research already tells us, and added something less well documented: the specific experience of Muslim men.
The headline finding? Stigma. The fear of being seen as weak. The sense that problems should be handled within existing circles – friendships, family, community. And within faith communities particularly, there’s a strong belief that religion should be the answer to everything. My argument is that the very thing stopping men from seeking help is also the tool we should use to reach them. Faith leaders, imams, community figures: if they normalised counselling the way they might normalise visiting a doctor, the impact could be enormous. Use the trusted voice. Meet people where they already are.
What actually happens in the room with men
I’ve worked with a good number of male clients already, and the pattern is consistent. Men are more reserved when it comes to emotions. They take longer to get there. But when you do connect with them – really resonate with them – the bond that forms is very strong.
The key thing I’ve noticed is how men frame why they’ve come. They don’t walk in saying, “I have trauma.” They don’t say, “I need to heal my childhood wounds.” They say: I just need to vent. I’m stressed. That’s why I’m here. And that framing matters, because if you move too fast – if you jump straight to, “actually, this isn’t stress, it’s about your childhood” – you’ll lose them.
Tim Bond, probably the most influential figure in UK counselling practice and the architect of the BACP guidelines, is clear: unless you have a good therapeutic relationship with the client, healing doesn’t take place. With men, you have to earn that relationship more slowly. Let them talk. Listen. Be there. Build trust. Only once that foundation is there can you start to explore further.
The turning point, when it comes, is usually about permission. Getting them to understand that having emotions isn’t weakness. That expressing feelings to a partner or family member isn’t a failure – it’s communication, and without it, no one around them knows what they need or how to help. They come in believing emotion is weakness. They leave understanding that it’s the thing that makes connection possible.
Trauma is at the root of so much. Exploring that means going back: Was your father absent? Unkind? Was your relationship with your mother non-affectionate? I’ll often notice when a client glosses over something – rushing through their childhood, skimming the surface – and I’ll stop them. Take a pause. Rewind. Tell me what it felt like in that moment when your father said that. If you could have had a different father, what would he have looked like? That pause, that challenge – that’s where the real work starts.
Trauma doesn’t have to be catastrophic
We tend to think of trauma as something obvious – something violent, something dramatic. But Gabor Maté, widely recognised for his work on trauma and childhood development, talks about micro-tears, micro-scratches: the small, repeated experiences that accumulate over time and create significant changes in the brain. A child whose brain learned to constantly scan for danger – monitoring an anxious parent, absorbing tension at home – carries that wiring forward into adult life. It’s not weakness. It’s adaptation.
Understanding this changes how we look at people. It creates compassion instead of judgement. And understanding, I’ve found, takes away shame – which is at the heart of so much of what men bring into the counselling room. Shame about needing help. Shame about having emotions at all. Shame about not being enough. Once a man starts to understand where those feelings come from, something shifts. The work of counselling is helping him to unpick all of that, and slowly recover who he actually is underneath.
I have clients – men who came in saying they just needed to vent, who are slowly learning that there’s more going on, that they’re allowed to feel it, and that asking for help is not the end of something. It might be the beginning.
Shah is a trainee counsellor currently completing his second year of study. He works with a small number of clients and has a particular interest in men’s mental health and faith communities.