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Comparatively, men have poorer physical and mental health outcomes than women, with a significantly higher suicide rate. Contributory factors are thought to be social and biological, leading to reduced access to health-care services. The study aims to develop and implement community-based support to increase awareness of and access to men’s mental health support networks and groups.

The project involved three key work-packages discussed in this paper: raising awareness of men’s mental health needs in health care, educational and community settings; collaboration between National Health Services (NHS) and non-NHS health-care support organisations to build multi-sector partnership working; and developing a supported sports-based community intervention aimed at men living with mental health conditions. The acceptability and feasibility of these work-packages were pragmatically evaluated through mixed-methods surveys and qualitative content analysis.

Overall, both community events and sports groups successfully engaged men living with mental health problems. Organisations interested in men’s mental health are continuing to engage in a partnership initiative. Community events were well-attended and received positive feedback, particularly regarding the educative and real-life experiences approach promoted in the events. The sports intervention is feasible and well-accepted by participants, who described feeling supported with their physical and mental health needs, with increased mental well-being reported.

The main limitations of this project are that the authors only evaluated a football group rather than all work areas. The project collected outcomes relating to participants’ demographics and qualitative reflections of participating in the football group along with a retrospective survey of perceived benefits, but the project did not undertake a pre- and post-comparison of well-being outcomes owing to low completion of these measures. Future work could focus on collecting more pre- and post-measures related to well-being, recovery and inclusion and compare these with men not involved in the football groups or public events.

This paper discusses the development and feasibility of setting up community-based men’s mental health support networks, involving public events, partnership working and targeted-sports interventions. All initiatives were well-received and successfully attended by men living with mental health conditions. Evaluation of the programme revealed the value placed on education about mental health and the role that community sports interventions may play in men’s mental health care.

This project has demonstrated three different ways of supporting men’s mental health needs in the community. Community public events were held to raise awareness of men’s mental health needs and issues were well-attended and highlighted the need for health promotion and education in this area across all the communities. The men’s football group demonstrated the feasibility of moving mental health support out into a non-clinical and more community arena in a way that men engaged effectively. Finally, the creation of MensNet has bought together disparate multi-sector organisations successfully to lead public health mechanisms to support men’s mental health needs.

This paper describes a new multi-disciplined approach to supporting health-seeking challenges among men, in particular, how partnership working across NHS and non-NHS sectors can successfully support an identified public health need pragmatically using existing services and organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of charismatic leadership style and value congruence on the social connectedness of retired men in Australian Men’s Sheds. This study also explores the impact of social connectedness on well-being outcomes, such as employment and training, improved family relationships and access to health and welfare services.

The methodology is a qualitative approach using focus groups (yarning circles) and semi-structured interviews with Shed leaders, men members and healthcare workers.

The findings suggest that a charismatic leader enhances the value congruence between leaders and their members through empowering, envisioning and empathy, which also contributes to the social connectedness of members and enhances well-being of retired men.

The study provides insights into the factors that contribute to successful leadership, participatory and leadership practices in the Groups/Sheds, and addresses a gap in the literature in the area of leadership and Men’s Sheds.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of masculine identity in generating value destruction and diminished well-being in a preventative health service.

This research used five focus groups with 39 Australian men aged between 50 and 74 years. Men’s participation in the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program informed the sample frame. In total, 12 Jungian male archetypes were used to identify different masculine identities.

Thematic analysis of the data revealed three themes of masculinity that explain why men destroy value by avoiding the use of a preventative health services including: rejection of the service reduces consumer disempowerment and emasculation, active rejection of resources creates positive agency and suppressing negative self-conscious emotions protects the self.

Limitations include the single context of bowel cancer screening. Future research could investigate value destruction in other preventative health contexts such as testicular cancer screening, sexual health screening and drug abuse.

Practical implications include fostering consumer empowerment when accessing services, developing consumer resources to create positive agency and boosting positive self-conscious emotions by promoting positive social norms.

This research is the first known study to explore how value is destroyed in men’s preventative health using the perspective of gender identity. This research also is the first to explore value destruction as an emotion regulation strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men created through Men’s Groups/Sheds across urban, regional and remote areas of Australia. Men’s Sheds are a safe space, resembling a work-shop setting or backyard shed, where men are encouraged to socialise and participate in health promotion, informal learning and engage in meaningful tasks both individually and at the community level.

Explore five case study sites through Wenger’s (1998) active communities of practice (CoP). Qualitative methods are presented and analysed; methods comprise semi-structured interviews and yarning circles (focus groups). Five Indigenous leaders/coordinators participated in semi-structured interviews, as well as five yarning circles with a total of 61 Indigenous men.

In a societal context in which Indigenous men in Australia experience a number of social and health issues, impeding their quality of life and future opportunities, the central finding of the paper is that the effective development of social relations and socially designed programs through Men’s Groups, operating as CoP, may contribute to overcoming many social and health well-being concerns.

Contributions will provide a better understanding of how Indigenous men are engaging with Men’s Sheds, and through those interactions, are learning new skills and contributing to social change.

This study explores the interplay between macro- and micro-level predictors of psychological well-being related to work and family. We use nations as the context and investigate how country-level gender equalities and gender norms affect individual well-being and its relationship to micro-level predictors.

Social role explanations suggest that women’s vulnerability in mental health is due to socially assigned gender roles and gendered socialization. We utilize multi-level modeling and data from the International Social Survey Programme 2002, to examine how the societal level gender climate impacts the effects of gender roles on psychological well-being for married and employed men and women in 33 countries.

Gender differences in mental health remain, but larger differences are observed in less egalitarian countries regarding gender. Also, caring roles are negatively associated with women’s psychological well-being to a greater degree than men’s, and the negative impacts are stronger in more egalitarian countries. Furthermore, men show lower well-being regarding work responsibility, but the gender effects are weaker in more egalitarian countries.

Our psychological well-being is affected not only by the actual role behaviors but also by how we each perceive these roles.

This study provides a broader picture of the relationship between gender and psychological well-being related to work and family. It also illustrates complex relationships between macro-level gender climate and individual-level psychological well-being and how structural differences may impact individual outcomes.

This paper seeks to provide an overview of key issues involved in older men's mental health and well being and describes a service improvement project called Grouchy Old Men? that focused on older men who were isolated and at risk of depression and suicide.

Grouchy Old Men? was a two‐year project that used a “change agent” model of organisational development, which aimed to improve the mental health and well being of older men through gathering and disseminating examples of good practice and piloting a training module to raise awareness about the mental health of older men.

The project was successful in supporting and promoting a number of local initiatives and organisations, as well as a national network, seeking to develop services to better meet the needs of this group, as well as raising awareness more generally about older men's mental health.

The paper suggests ways that services for older people can develop in order to make themselves more accessible to older men with mental health needs.

The paper brings together policy, research, and practical service improvement initiatives that will be of interest and relevance to policy makers, practitioners, and anyone with an interest in the mental health of older men.

Objective: to find out more about older men's experience of social activities including their preferences for creating and maintaining satisfying social connections and to identify barriers and enablers to their participation in social activities.Method: men aged 65 and older living in Central Sydney Area Health Service (CSAHS) were recruited for five focus groups (n=29). The men were asked about their experience of social interaction, with the transcripts of the groups analysed thematically.Results: retirement, health changes, divorce, widowhood and changing personal relationships challenged social well‐being. Strategies employed to combat these challenges included: a positive attitude, physical and mental activity and involvement in meaningful activities. Participants outlined their preferences for socialising within activities and suggested these differed from women's.Conclusion: activities that men saw as meaningful helped them cope with challenging events. Older men have preferred ways of maintaining social well‐being and constructing social networks that may be influential in developing services.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework that clarifies the social supportive role of cancer resource center services in the lives of men with cancer and its impact on their perceived quality of life.

Personal reflections.

The authors put forth a conceptual framework which shows that men with cancer may perceive the availability of four types of social support from others present in a cancer resource center. The perceived availability of social support is posited to enhance their perceptions of their quality of life.

The study yields propositions that may be empirically tested by services and health researchers in future studies. In addition, the research findings may not extend to terminally ill male cancer patients.

Given the health benefits associated with social support, health-care professionals, social workers and cancer center directors should encourage their male cancer patients to participate in cancer resource programing and activities.

Cancer resource centers offer male cancer patients opportunities to enhance their quality of life beyond the use of pharmaceutical drugs or professional medical treatment. The health benefits may lower costs associated with medical expenses.

This study contributes to an emerging paradigm in services marketing. It is one of the first papers to focus on the socially supportive role that cancer resource center services may assume in the lives of men with cancer and those surviving the disease.

This paper aims to explore the well-being impacts of social enterprise, beyond a social enterprise per se, in everyday community life.

An exploratory case study was used. The study’s underpinning theory is from relational geography, including Spaces of Wellbeing Theory and therapeutic assemblage. These theories underpin data collection methods. Nine social enterprise participants were engaged in mental mapping and walking interviews. Four other informants with “boundary-spanning” roles involving knowledge of the social enterprise and the community were interviewed. Data were managed using NVivo, and analysed thematically.

Well-being realised from “being inside” a social enterprise organisation was further developed for participants, in the community, through positive interactions with people, material objects, stories and performances of well-being that occurred in everyday community life. Boundary spanning community members had roles in referring participants to social enterprise, mediating between participants and structures of community life and normalising social enterprise in the community. They also gained benefit from social enterprise involvement.

This paper uses relational geography and aligned methods to reveal the intricate connections between social enterprise and well-being realisation in community life. There is potential to pursue this research on a larger scale to provide needed evidence about how well-being is realised in social enterprises and then extends into communities.