What Is Happening to Young Men?
A recent CBC News article, “The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse,” drew attention to something that has been developing in Canada for some time: many young men are not doing particularly well. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/the-mental-health-of-young-men-is-declining-experts-warn-it-could-get-worse-9.7361010).
The numbers deserve attention.
Between 2012 and 2022, the percentage of Canadian men aged 15 to 24 reporting a mood disorder increased from 11 to 16 per cent, while reported generalized anxiety disorder increased from four to 10 per cent. Over the same period, the percentage describing their mental health as very good or excellent fell from 70 to 52 per cent.
Perhaps the most sobering statistic is one that isn't new. Men account for roughly three-quarters of suicide deaths in Canada, and suicide has remained the second-leading cause of death among Canadians aged 15 to 34 for more than two decades.
Something is going on. The difficult question is what.
There probably isn't one answer. In fact, looking for a single explanation may be part of the problem.
The young men now entering adulthood grew up during a period of remarkably rapid social change. They were among the first generations to experience adolescence with smartphones and social media as a nearly constant presence. Many experienced family separation or instability. Their education, friendships and important developmental experiences were interrupted by a global pandemic. They are entering adulthood amid concerns about housing affordability, employment and financial independence. They are trying to understand what it means to be a man at a time when expectations around gender have changed considerably.
And while all of that was happening, several powerful industries became very good at competing for their attention.
When the hockey game became a casino
Of all these changes, the speed with which gambling has become embedded in Canadian sports culture is one of the most striking to me.
Until 2021, betting on the outcome of a single sporting event was prohibited under Canada's Criminal Code. Parliament changed that law, allowing provinces and territories to regulate single-event sports betting.
What followed happened remarkably quickly. In only a few years, sports betting seems to have gone from something that existed largely outside mainstream Canadian sports culture to something that can be difficult to escape from within it. Watch a hockey, basketball or football game and you may encounter gambling companies sponsoring broadcasts, betting odds incorporated into sports commentary, advertisements during commercial breaks and promotions encouraging viewers to download an app and place a bet.
The casino, in effect, moved into the phone.
That transition is particularly striking when compared with Canada's legalization of cannabis.
Whatever one's views about cannabis legalization, the federal government spent years publicly discussing how legalization should occur. It established an expert task force, conducted formal public consultations, sought input from public-health and substance-use experts and ultimately produced an extensive report containing more than 80 recommendations before the new legal framework was implemented.
Sports betting feels very different.
The legal change itself did not create today's advertising environment. Provinces determine how gambling is regulated, and approaches differ across Canada. But I wonder whether anyone adequately anticipated what would happen when legal single-event sports betting collided with smartphones, instant electronic payments, sophisticated behavioural marketing and Canada's enormous professional sports culture.
The emerging research gives reason to ask that question. Researchers examining only seven NHL and NBA broadcasts in Ontario identified more than 4,100 gambling-related messages. Gambling references were visible during more than one-fifth of the total broadcast time.
Recent Canadian research involving more than 1,800 sports bettors in Alberta and Ontario found that 77 per cent of young men surveyed encountered sports-betting advertising every week. Men under 30 experienced substantially greater gambling-related harm and higher anxiety than the broader population of sports bettors studied.
Some of the most concerning evidence is now appearing in emergency departments. Following Ontario's expansion of online gambling in 2022, researchers found a significant increase in emergency-department visits for gambling disorders. Among males aged 10 to 29, by the end of the study period those visits were 154 per cent higher than researchers estimated they would have been without the market expansion.
That doesn't prove that sports betting caused every one of those crises. But surely it is enough to justify asking whether Canada moved too far, too fast.
And perhaps an even more difficult question: Can governments still dial this back?
Could federal and provincial governments slow the commercialization of sports betting while researchers determine more clearly what widespread, constantly available online gambling is doing to young adults? Could advertising during sporting events be substantially restricted? Could governments reconsider the degree to which gambling has been allowed to become intertwined with sports broadcasting itself?
Or has that horse already left the barn?
There is an uncomfortable tension here as well. Governments regulate gambling while also receiving substantial revenue from it. When discussing the economic benefits of legalized gambling, the costs therefore need to be counted too—not simply revenue generated, but addiction treatment, mental-health crises, financial losses, relationship breakdown and other harms borne by individuals, families and the health-care system.
I wonder how Canadians will look back on this period twenty or thirty years from now?
There was a time when cigarette advertising was simply part of the landscape. Tobacco companies sponsored sporting events. Their logos appeared everywhere. Smoking was normalized through advertising and popular culture long before society fully confronted the public-health consequences and governments imposed much stronger restrictions.
Gambling and tobacco are not identical products, and the analogy should not be pushed too far. But there is a lesson in that history.
Commercial industries can become deeply normalized before the full population-level consequences of their products are understood. Once substantial corporate profits and government revenues become attached to those industries, changing course can become considerably harder.
It is possible that decades from now Canadians will look back at the early 2020s and wonder why gambling advertising became so thoroughly integrated into professional sport before its effects on a generation of young men were adequately understood.
I hope we don't have reason to regret that experiment.
The phone changed adolescence too
Sports betting is part of another enormous change.
Today's young men were among the first generations to go through adolescence with an extraordinarily powerful social environment carried around continuously in their pockets. The smartphone has brought connection, entertainment, information and community. It would be far too simplistic to say that phones or social media are simply bad for young people.
The research doesn't support such a simple conclusion either. What it increasingly suggests is that how people use these technologies matters.
A recent systematic review and meta-analysis involving more than 81,000 adolescents and young adults found only a small relationship between the amount of time spent on social media and loneliness. Problematic social-media use, however, showed a considerably stronger association with loneliness.
That distinction matters. The issue isn't simply the existence of screens. It is what can happen when digital life begins replacing sleep, physical activity, face-to-face friendships, community involvement and meaningful participation in the physical world.
It also matters what young men encounter there.
A young man who feels unsuccessful, lonely, unattractive or uncertain about his future can go online looking for answers about confidence, dating, masculinity or belonging and find thoughtful voices. He can also find an algorithmically amplified world telling him that his worth depends on money, sexual success, dominance, physical appearance and status.
As the CBC article describes, this can include the manosphere, influencers such as Andrew Tate and increasingly extreme phenomena such as "looksmaxxing."
There is a cruel irony here. A young man who already feels inadequate can go online looking for guidance about how to become a man and encounter an endless stream of people telling him all the ways in which he isn't enough of one.
Then came COVID
Onto this already changing developmental landscape came a global pandemic.
Schools and universities closed. Sports stopped. Activities disappeared. Workplaces changed. Friendships moved online. Dating changed. Ordinary developmental experiences were interrupted.
For teenagers and young adults, those weren't small losses. A Canadian study of men during the pandemic found that lower social connection was associated with greater anxiety and depressive symptoms, with younger men particularly vulnerable.
COVID did not create all of the problems facing young men today. Many of these trends predated 2020.
It does apprear to have intensified some of them. Human development doesn't come with a pause button.
A 17-year-old doesn't get his seventeenth year back because the world was experiencing a pandemic. Neither does a 20-year-old get back the first year of university, apprenticeship, work, dating, independence or social life that didn't happen as expected.
The young men who experienced those disruptions are now in their twenties.
Families have changed too
There is another subject that can be difficult to discuss because it can quickly become moralized: family structure.
Divorce does not doom children. Neither does growing up with a single parent. Millions of people thrive after parental separation or within single-parent and blended families. Remaining in a chronically hostile or unsafe marriage is certainly not inherently better for children.
At the same time, it would be equally unhelpful to pretend family disruption has no consequences. A large meta-analysis involving more than half a million participants found parental divorce associated with increased later risk of depression, anxiety, psychological distress, suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and substance use.
“Divorce" is not really a mechanism. What happens around it matters enormously: parental conflict, financial stress, instability, moving homes or schools, loss of contact with a parent, parental mental health and the ability of separated parents to cooperate in raising their children. Those childhood experiences don't disappear when someone turns 18. They become part of the developmental history that young adults bring into friendships, intimate relationships, work and their understanding of themselves.
For young men, this conversation sometimes intersects with another issue raised in the CBC article: access to adult male role models.
Only about one-quarter of Canadian elementary and secondary school teachers are men. Organizations attempting to provide mentorship to young people also report difficulty recruiting male volunteers. That doesn't mean boys can only learn from men. Women have been extraordinary teachers, coaches, parents and mentors to generations of boys.
However, boys and young men also benefit from having good men in their lives.
Not influencers. Not "alpha males."
Actual men they know. Fathers, grandfathers, uncles, teachers, coaches, neighbours, employers, colleagues and mentors who demonstrate that being male can include strength and vulnerability, competitiveness and kindness, independence and connection, competence and the ability to ask for help.
Young men are trying to find their place
There are economic and educational changes worth considering as well. Women now substantially outnumber men in Canadian postsecondary education. Men account for fewer than half of Canadian postsecondary students.
That is not an argument that women's educational progress has somehow harmed men. Expanding opportunities for women was necessary and overdue. Concern about young men falling behind doesn't diminish that achievement.
Both things can matter.
Young Canadians are also entering adulthood during a period in which housing and financial independence have become increasingly difficult to attain.
These pressures affect young women too.
They may interact differently with young men's identities when men continue receiving powerful cultural messages that a successful man should be independent, financially capable, confident and able to provide.
There is an interesting contradiction here. Young men may hear that they should no longer define themselves according to traditional masculine roles while simultaneously absorbing messages—from peers, dating culture, advertising and social media—that desirable men should be confident, attractive, muscular, financially successful, sexually successful and independent.
It isn't difficult to understand why some young men might be confused about what is expected of them. Into that confusion step online personalities offering remarkably simple answers.
Masculinity itself isn't the problem
I think an important distinction sometimes gets lost in conversations about "toxic masculinity."
There are aspects of traditional masculine socialization that can cause harm.
Research has repeatedly found that emotional restriction and rigid expectations of self-reliance can interfere with men's willingness to seek psychological help. Canadian research has found that a substantial proportion of young men continue to view asking for mental-health help as a sign of weakness.
That is a serious problem.
Masculinity itself is not a mental illness. Traits traditionally considered masculine—assertiveness, ambition, courage, perseverance, independence, competitiveness and the desire to protect or provide for others—can be enormously positive. The problem comes when masculinity becomes so rigid that a man cannot admit fear, ask for help, tolerate failure, depend upon somebody else or experience vulnerability without interpreting those things as evidence that he is somehow less of a man.
The answer isn't to teach young men not to be masculine. It is to give them a larger and healthier definition of what being a man can mean.
A man can be strong. He can also be frightened. He can compete. He can also cooperate. He can be independent while recognizing that no human being is entirely self-sufficient. He can take responsibility for himself while knowing when he needs somebody else. He can protect others without needing to dominate them.
Perhaps just as importantly, he can experience depression, loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty or failure without those experiences making him less of a man.
Young men need somewhere to belong
One of the more encouraging findings in the research is also remarkably ordinary.
Relationships matter. Belonging matters.
Research on organized sport among young people consistently finds associations with better psychological and social outcomes, including greater self-esteem and life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. Team sports appear particularly beneficial.
The mechanism isn't simply exercise. It's also belonging. Teammates. Coaches. Shared goals. Competence. Structure. Adult support. Being expected somewhere on Tuesday evening and knowing that other people notice whether you arrive. Sport isn't the only place where this can happen.
It can happen through music, theatre, martial arts, volunteering, community organizations, workplaces, cultural communities, faith communities and countless other settings. Young men need places in the physical world where they are known. Where they contribute. Where somebody notices when they don't show up. Where friendships develop through doing things together rather than simply communicating through screens. Where they can become competent at something difficult. Where they have responsibilities.
And where they encounter men worth becoming.
We need to stop waiting until men are in crisis
Canada is now examining the mental health and well-being of boys and men at the federal level. That conversation is overdue. For too long, concern about men and boys has sometimes been treated as though it necessarily competes with concern about women and girls. It doesn't.
Mental health isn't a zero-sum game. Acknowledging the profound historical and continuing inequities experienced by women does not require ignoring a 24-year-old man who is lonely, addicted to gambling, unable to find his footing in work or relationships, or thinking about suicide.
Likewise, caring about struggling young men does not require blaming women, feminism, changing gender identities or any of the other convenient targets offered by parts of the online manosphere.
Young men deserve something better than another culture war. They deserve serious consideration of the world in which they are actually trying to become adults.
That means examining how gambling is marketed.
It means helping young people develop healthier relationships with technology.
It means rebuilding opportunities for face-to-face friendship and community.
It means supporting families—including families going through separation.
It means creating places where young men can move, compete, build, create, take reasonable risks and develop competence.
It means encouraging men to become teachers, coaches, counsellors and mentors.
And it means creating mental-health services that young men will actually use rather than simply concluding that men are "resistant to therapy" when they don't respond to services that may not have been designed with them in mind.
As a counsellor working with adult men, I think there is another part of this conversation that matters. By the time a man walks into a counselling office, the story did not begin that morning.
He brings the family he grew up in. The ideas about masculinity he absorbed. The relationships that worked and those that didn't. The failures he hasn't told anyone about. The pressure he feels to succeed. The ways he learned to deal with fear, anger, shame and loneliness. Increasingly, he may also bring years spent navigating a digital environment specifically engineered to capture and hold his attention.
Telling him simply to "talk about his feelings" doesn't begin to capture the complexity of that story.
Of course men need to be able to talk. But they also need meaningful relationships, purpose, competence, responsibility, community and hope that their lives are going somewhere.
Perhaps the questions young men are asking aren't particularly new:
Where do I belong?
What am I good at?
What am I responsible for?
Who needs me?
Who can I depend upon when I can't manage something alone?
What does it mean to be a good man?
And what kind of man do I want to become?
Those questions deserve thoughtful answers. If families, communities, educators, mentors and mental-health professionals aren't helping young men find them, there are plenty of people and industries on their phones offering answers of their own.
Counselling for Men
Virtual Counselling for Men in Alberta and Across Canada
References & Further Reading
Auersperg, F., Vlasak, T., Ponocny, I., & Barth, A. (2019). Long-term effects of parental divorce on mental health: A meta-analysis. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 119, 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2019.09.011
Feng, H.-P., Lien, Y.-J., Cian, S.-Y., Wang, W.-Y., Li, Y.-T., Chen, C.-H., et al. (2026). Exploring the relationship between social media use and loneliness in adolescents and young adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 61, 1345–1359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-026-03175-4
Forrest, R., Doan, N., MacDonald-Spracklin, R., Pugliese, M., Turner, N., & Myran, D. (2026). Emergency department visits for gambling disorders after the legalization of single-event sports betting and rapid expansion of online gambling. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. https://www.ices.on.ca/publications/journal-articles/emergency-department-visits-for-gambling-disorders-after-the-legalization-of-single-event-sports-betting-and-rapid-expansion-of-online-gambling/
Government of Canada. (2026). Improving the health of men and boys in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/healthy-living/improving-health-men-canada.html
Hennessy, A. (2026). The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/the-mental-health-of-young-men-is-declining-experts-warn-it-could-get-worse-9.7361010
Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). (2026). Emergency room visits for gambling disorders nearly doubled after expanded online gambling market. https://www.ices.on.ca/news-releases/emergency-room-visits-for-gambling-disorders-nearly-doubled-after-expanded-online-gambling-market/
McGrane, E., Pryce, R., Wilson, L. B., Field, M., Goyder, E., & Gough, B. (2024). Gambling advertisements in Ontario: Exploring the prevalence and regulatory compliance of televised and social media marketing during sports matches. International Gambling Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2024.2400356
Seidler, Z. E., Dawes, A. J., Rice, S. M., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2016). The role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 49, 106–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.09.002
Toronto Metropolitan University. (2026). New research on sports betting advertising linked to negative impacts on young men. https://www.torontomu.ca/media/releases/2026/04/new-research-on-sports-betting-advertising-linked-to-negative-impacts-on-young-men/
