Innovative Approaches to Men’s Mental Health: Enhancing Service Utilization, Reducing Stigma, and Preventing Suicide

Men experience disproportionately high suicide mortality rates yet demonstrate substantially lower engagement with formal mental health services, a paradox linked to structural barriers, restrictive gender norms, and both external and internalized stigma surrounding help-seeking. Amid rising social isolation, economic precarity, and shifting gender norms, men’s suicide risk remains elevated globally, with widening disparities among racial/ethnic minority, rural, and sexual and gender minority men. These trends underscore the urgency of scalable, contextually responsive solutions. Traditional models of care often fail to consider gendered pathways to distress, leading to under identification, underdiagnosis, and undertreatment. Grounded in intersectional and ecological frameworks that recognize masculinity as socially constructed and structurally mediated, emerging research emphasizes the need for multilevel, contextually- and culturally-responsive interventions that increase service utilization, challenge stigma, and address modifiable risk mechanisms across clinical, community, and policy settings. Advancing men’s mental health, therefore, requires integrating prevention and early-intervention strategies with implementation approaches that improve accessibility, acceptability, and sustained engagement in care to reduce suicide risk at the population level.Despite growing recognition of men’s elevated suicide risk, existing mental health systems remain poorly aligned with men’s patterns of help-seeking, resulting in late intervention, crisis-driven service use, and persistent treatment gaps. Interventions are often fragmented, individually focused, and insufficiently responsive to sociocultural constructions of masculinity, structural inequities, and community contexts that shape engagement. This Research Topic seeks to address the lack of scalable, theory-driven, and implementation-ready strategies that simultaneously increase service utilization, reduce stigma, and intervene on upstream risk pathways. Particular attention is given to approaches that move beyond individual-level behavior change to address organizational practices, community norms, and policy environments that influence help-seeking. Progress requires developing and rigorously testing gender-responsive, community-embedded, and digitally enhanced approaches, alongside policy and systems-level changes that normalize help-seeking and improve equitable access to acceptable, high-quality care.This Research Topic welcomes contributions that advance intervention science for men’s mental health across diverse contexts and methodologies. Priority themes include masculinity-informed and culturally responsive interventions; workplace, school, and community-based programs; digital, mobile, and telehealth innovations; primary care and emergency department identification and referral pathways; lethal means safety; peer and family engagement; and equity-focused implementation strategies that address racial, socioeconomic, sexual, and gender minority disparities. We are particularly interested in empirical studies that develop, adapt, implement, or evaluate intervention programs for men. Submissions may employ qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods designs, including feasibility, acceptability, effectiveness, hybrid implementation-effectiveness trials, and community-engaged or participatory approaches. Topic editors: Michael Curtis, Joshua Boe, Luis Valdez Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78533/innovative-approaches-to-mens-mental-health-enhancing-service-utilization-reducing-stigma-and-preventing-suicide