Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many high-income countries, the rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged men. Despite this, few studies have explored the factors that underpin psychological distress and support-seeking among this cohort. This qualitative study used an intersectional approach to account for the plurality of middle-age masculinities and to offer deeper insights into middle-age men’s mental health experiences. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with nine demographic groups of middle-aged men considered ‘at risk’ of suicide in Ireland (n=34). Data collection and data analysis were informed by the principles of grounded theory. A master code list and conceptual maps were developed from which four themes emerged. Theme 1 Reconciling Increasing Expectations with Diminishing Capacities to Achieve at Middle-Age captures various tensions that emanated from expectations on men to have acquired mastery of various gendered norms by middle-age that coincided with a reality of different manifestations of middle-aged vulnerability as well as large scale societal change in Ireland. Theme 2 Isolation at Middle-Age broadly describes a sense of loneliness at middle-age as a result of narrowing social circles, a lack of social outlets, relationship breakdown and living alone. For those men who experienced discrimination, prejudice or racism, their isolation tended to be more deep-rooted and multifaceted and was a particular source of psychological distress. The notion of a ‘double burden’ was central to Theme 3 Barriers to Support Seeking, and encapsulated men’s sense of shame in having to ask for help and ‘failing’ to manage their own problems. Theme 4 Catalysts for Change & Strategies for Improved Self-Care highlights what were seen as the foundations of good mental health for middle-aged men, as well as the value of educational programmes and social contact. The use of an intersectional approach in this study fostered a deeper understanding of the blended identities and wide range of mental health experiences of middle-age men which have informed training and resources currently being implemented under the auspices of ‘Connecting for Life’, Ireland’s strategy to reduce suicide.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".