Community-led non-clinical interventions in men’s mental health and wellbeing in North East England

Exploring the value of non-clinical interventions to improve mental health and wellbeing in the North East of England.

This project aims to explore the value of non-clinical interventions to improve mental health and wellbeing in working class men in the North East of England, with a particular focus on community-led interventions that aim to foster belonging and to co-produce a methodology for assessing their effectiveness. This will address the Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing’s aim to develop improvements in mental health and wellbeing through transformative cross-disciplinary research and partnerships for prevention and early intervention. 

The project develops and extends emerging relationships between UCL and national and local actors and emerges from previous research on ‘left-behind’ places in North East England and ongoing discussions with communities. It has been jointly developed with Space UK, a men’s mental health organisation in Sunderland.

Within a broad societal concern about deteriorating mental health, specific attention has been paid to the position of boys and men who, by many measures, are experiencing a sharp decline in mental (and physical) well-being as part of a more general worsening of their social position (see Reeves, 2022, for an overview of the evidence). This is particularly true of white working class men. This issue was highlighted in the US by Case and Deaton in their work of ‘deaths of despair’ (deaths by drugs, alcohol, suicide) (Case and Deaton, 2015; 2020). Subsequent work identified a highly uneven geography of ‘deaths of despair’ between and within states, regions and counties (e.g. Lee, at al, 2023). 

The social and geographical patterning of deaths of despair is closely linked to the geography of deindustrialisation, which has had particular impacts on working class white men. Angus Deaton has suggested that with the loss of traditional industries and wider social changes, some men ‘have lost the narrative of their lives — meaning something like a loss of hope, a loss of expectations of progress’ (quoted in Belluz, 2015). A corpus of research in sociology, psychology and political science, sheds some light on these processes. For instance, Robert Wuthnow (2019: 56) has suggested that “a sense of loss, a feeling of grief” accompanies the demise of traditional industries in ‘left-behind’ America. Hitherto, such industries had helped to produce distinctive ‘moral communities’, which have been undermined by structural economic change. Cohen (2022), drawing a body of work in social psychology, has identified a “crisis of belonging” that is leading to chronic loneliness and attendant effects in education, health and politics.

Indeed, the US Surgeon General (2023) has identified an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, which contributes to deteriorating mental (and physical) wellbeing. Both Cohen and the US Surgeon General point to the importance of fostering connection and community as the antidote to the symptoms they observe. Political scientists have charted the long decline of institutions that foster connections and belonging (e.g. Putnam, 2000; Putnam and Garrett, 2020). Klinenberg has noted the importance of social infrastructure in fostering connection and observed its relative decline in the US, especially in deindustrialised communities.

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