5. Men, Addiction & The Silence Around It
How masculinity norms fuel addiction & why recovery for men requires a different kind of honesty
By Michael J. Theron, Clinical Psychologist
I write this from a particular vantage point: as a clinician who has worked with addiction for many years, and as a man who has lived through it. I know both sides of this from the inside. And one of the things I know with clarity is that the same cultural pressures that make it hard for men to ask for help with their mental health are precisely what drives many men into addiction in the first place.
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
The Logic of Using
From a distance, addiction can look like a failure of will, a bad habit, a moral lapse. From the inside — and from a clinical perspective — it looks like a solution. A solution that works, initially, and then stops working while the dependency remains.
For many men, substances solve a specific problem: they make it possible to feel less, or more, depending on what's needed. The pressure of the day — the financial stress, the fatherhood anxiety, the unexpressed grief, the unnamed depression — temporarily recedes. The social armour relaxes. Something that has been held tightly loosens. And for a man who has been taught that the tightness is non-negotiable, that loosening feels like a rescue.
This is why understanding addiction in men requires understanding what the substance was doing for the man. It was never just about the substance.
Men Are More Vulnerable
Men are statistically more likely to develop substance use disorders than women. This is not primarily a biological fact — though biology plays a role. It is substantially a consequence of how men are socialised to manage emotional distress.
When something is painful, and you've been taught that naming it is weakness, and you don't have the emotional vocabulary to describe what you're feeling even if you wanted to, the options narrow. You can suppress it, which works until it doesn't. You can work obsessively, which provides some relief. Or you can chemically alter the internal state, which provides immediate and effective relief — until the dose needs to increase, until the consequences accumulate, until you're dependent on a solution that has become its own problem.
Addicted Men & Shame
Men with addiction carry a doubled shame: the shame of the addiction itself, layered on top of the shame of having needed it. The cultural script says a strong man handles things. An addicted man has not handled things. In his own internal accounting, he has failed at being a man. That shame is one of the primary barriers to seeking help.
In my clinical experience, getting to the addiction is often the easier part. Getting to what the addiction was managing — and helping a man tolerate being with those feelings without the substance — is where the real work lives.
Why Recovery Looks Different
The traditional recovery model — vulnerability, sharing, emotional processing in group — is genuinely useful. It is also, for many men, structurally uncomfortable in ways that need to be acknowledged. Men who have spent decades suppressing emotional experience do not typically find it easy to suddenly sit in a circle and be open. The discomfort is not stubbornness. It is the natural consequence of a lifetime of conditioning.
Effective recovery for men often involves finding pathways to the same destination that don't require immediate emotional fluency. Action-oriented, structured, incremental. Building trust before vulnerability is required. Creating conditions in which opening up is possible rather than demanded.
The destination is the same: honest relationship with oneself and others, accountability, new ways of managing what was previously managed chemically. The pathway has to be one that the person can actually walk.
If You Recognise This
If you've been using something — alcohol, substances, anything else — to manage a pressure that you haven't been able to name, that is not a moral failure. It is a human response to a real weight, combined with insufficient tools for carrying it differently.
It is also something that changes. I've seen it change, in people who arrived in crisis and built something different on the other side. I've lived it. The change is not easy, and it is not fast. But it is possible, and it begins with being honest about what's actually happening.
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The final post in this series looks at what it might mean to fundamentally reconsider what strength is — and what a different kind of masculinity could look like.
Related Resources:
For an overview of psychological support and related MJT services, visit the Men’s Mental Health page.
