Patriarchy’s other victims; The silent crisis of Ghanaian men
From boyhood, Ghanaian men learn that pain is private, feelings are weakness and asking for help is failure. The cost is counted in the men who stopped speaking long before anyone noticed.
Among the words reportedly left by a former MTN employee who died by suicide this month was a complaint more damning. He had said he was struggling, and his friends laughed. They took it for a joke. He had tried once to say it out loud, and what he heard back was that it was not serious. According to reports, he spent years afterwards appearing happy to everyone around him.
His story, as reported, is a single case, and no one outside his family can claim to know what led to it. Suicide is never the result of one cause or one conversation. But it is a story Ghanaian men will recognise, because the failure it describes did not begin that day, and it did not begin with those friends. It began with a society that teaches boys, long before they can name a feeling, that a feeling is something to hide.
The bargain
Patriarchy is usually discussed as what men do to women. It also does something to men, and the two are connected. The patriarchal bargain offers men authority: head of the household, decision-maker, the one whose word settles things. In exchange it charges silence. A man must provide, protect, lead and never wobble. The moment he admits he cannot do all four, he has not just confessed to a problem. He has defaulted on his entire social identity.
That is why the phrases are so familiar: “be a man,” “men don’t cry,” “man up,” “take it like a man.” Nobody has to be cruel for this to work. A father says it to steady a crying son. A mother says it to spare him mockery. An uncle says it as a joke at a family gathering. By the age of twelve, the lesson has been taught by so many loving people that it feels like common sense.
Note who enforces it. Patriarchy survives not only through men but through the mothers who tell their sons to stop crying, the women who admire the “strong, silent” man and the communities that treat a man’s open distress as an embarrassment to the family. Reform has to include everyone who holds the rulebook.
The provider trap
Then there is money. The Ghanaian man is expected to be the provider in an economy that has made providing harder. A cedi that has lost over 11% of its value this year, rents that demand lump-sum payment, a job market that leaves graduates hustling: each of these pressures is felt as personal failure, because the culture has defined his worth as what he brings home. When income falls, he does not just lose money; he loses standing. And the one thing that standing forbids is telling anyone.
The outlets men are allowed
Silence does not make pain disappear. It looks for exits. For many men the socially acceptable exits are alcohol, work, football, anger, silence and, increasingly, betting. Drinking with friends is a form of company; saying “I’m not okay” to those same friends is not. Male friendship in Ghana often runs on banter, which is warm, but it also makes sincerity risky. The man who says something raw has to prepare for the laugh.
Religion adds its own complication. Faith is a real comfort to many, and no one should mock it. But when distress is automatically relabelled as a spiritual attack or a lack of prayer, the professional help that could actually treat depression or addiction is delayed or never sought.
What the numbers show, and what they hide
The data is incomplete, and it should be treated carefully. The Mental Health Authority reported up to a 40% rise in suicide deaths in 2024, though it also said better reporting may explain part of that increase. Estimates have long put annual deaths near 1,500, far above officially reported counts, which tells you how much goes unrecorded. Ghana Psychological Association figures cited when attempted suicide was decriminalised in 2023 said women attempt suicide about three times as often as men, yet men die by suicide about four times as often. Men, in other words, tend to get less warning and less help along the way.
Decriminalisation was a genuine step forward. For years, a person in despair who survived an attempt could be treated as a criminal rather than as someone in an emergency. The law has changed. The culture has not caught up.
Is the modern Ghanaian man any different?
Partly, and it would be unfair to say otherwise. A younger generation of men is talking, on podcasts, in online communities and in therapy rooms that did not exist for their fathers. Fathers are more involved, and the vocabulary of mental health is no longer foreign. That is real progress.
However, be on the lookout for the counterfeit. Some of the loudest modern masculinity content simply rebrands the old silence as discipline: grind harder, stay stoic, cut off weakness, never complain. It has better production values than “men don’t cry,” and the same message. Many men have also become fluent in the language of mental health in public while staying mute in private, comfortable posting about it, not saying it to the friend across the table. The test of change is not what a man shares online. It is whether he has one person he can tell, and whether that person will treat it seriously.
What Ghana should do
Start at home and in school. Teach boys the vocabulary of feeling, so they are not left with only anger and silence. Make counselling a normal part of schools, universities and workplaces, and not a crisis measure. Employers should look at whether their employee support and sick-leave cultures actually let men use them without penalty. Churches and mosques should preach compassion and make referral to professional care a routine pastoral act, not a last resort. And the rest of us can practise the simplest intervention there is: when a man says something heavy, do not make it a joke.
A man who says he is struggling is not weak. He is the most useful person in the room, because he is telling the truth at the cost of his pride. The country’s task is to make that cost lower, and to stop acting surprised when it keeps being too high.
By Hannah Agyemang
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