OUMSA Executive Formal Responses:
26/05/2018- In regards to Men in Med:
To all those who placed feedback via the Online Suggestion box, or in person, thank you for your open and honest sentiments with regards to our newfound initiative. One of the biggest things we advocate for as a student group is freedom of speech, so it is very important to us that everyone sees it possible to stand up and let their voices be heard. Thank you for taking the step to let us know your thoughts – we have a diverse executive group, with people from many different backgrounds, who work together and agree on things before we set plans into place. Regardless, we cannot claim to speak on behalf of every medical student at Otago, so these feedback channels are essential in ensuring that we are representing our cohort accurately, and appropriately.
However, giving feedback can seem meaningless unless you know you are being heard out, and at this point we as the OUMSA Executive would like to sincerely apologise on behalf of the Executive for our delay in response to your feedback. It has been a very busy few weeks for us, and some key members that are involved in the process of taking feedback on board and responding to it have been quite unwell – writing this response slipped through the cracks, and it shouldn’t have, so we would like to front up and say sorry for that.
In response to your feedback:
Concerns were raised that the male medical student cohort were not at risk enough in terms of mental health issues to warrant the creation of a group that was exclusive to the male gender. Men and women are both affected by suicide, and in different ways, in the medical cohort and nationally. It was a mistake to say that we started Men in Med in response to a statistic, because in reality it wasn’t a statistic that is published in a journal or peer-reviewed. It’s the statistic that I’ve seen night after night, week after week, as a young male growing up in New Zealand and heading to University, which is that in general, men find it a lot harder to openly talk about their mental health with their peers. A lot of men lack a safe space in their lives to outlet these feelings, so we started Men in Med in order to provide one. Male medical students may not be the single most at risk group, or be in the greatest need, but there is clearly a need there.
A point was made that as men, we cannot claim to understand sexism in the way that a woman does. While yes this is very true, the same perhaps can be said in reverse, that many women may not understand the difficulties men have in regards to having conversations surrounding mental health, especially in a New Zealand context. The Number-8 wire, tough-as-old-boots character that Kiwi men were raised to personify doesn’t fit this day and age, but the social pressures to embody it still exist. Leaders of our community like Sir John Kirwan and Mike King have been advocates for male mental health for nearly 30 years now, doing amazing work and in part changing the way Kiwi men think about mental health, but there is still work to be done. We felt we needed a student lead initiative that targeted a specific population – male students that just needed an appropriate outlet. A lot of men feel that current, more non-specific, gender-inclusive mental health initiatives aren’t targeted towards them, so they as a group miss out.
Thoughts were expressed that creating such a group would just be strengthening the gender divide, and that it would be better to create a group in which people of all genders could discuss their mental health – and yes, in a perfect world one day we hope groups like this will be organised and well attended by all – but we aren’t there yet. Some men are uncomfortable talking about their mental health, even with members of their own gender – we need to start somewhere. Men in Med was never meant to be a long term fix, it’s about getting a foot in the door, making small but definite steps towards better mental health for all. Providing an opportunity for guys to get together and support each other doesn’t preclude the breakdown of the gender divide – specifically targeting men with positive role models, a positive and safe environment and a support network may in fact provide guys with better tools to be a positive and connected member of their community, which benefits everyone in the long run. I’m not denying that historically, and even presently, men have held many privileges over women which they shouldn’t, but that shouldn’t eliminate the possibility of helping men when they need it – equity means helping those who need it, regardless of gender.
We never sold Men in Med as “mental health initiative” from the get-go, we sold it as a chill space for guys to come hang out, in the hopes that once we had a good base of boys attending and building strong friendships, we could start having those conversations and hopefully seeing some good results. This perhaps was a mistake. Our worry with selling it as a “mental health initiative” was that we would be systematically excluding our very target population. Try telling a second year medical student flatting on Castle St to come along to your new men’s mental health support group on a Friday night, and the response will be quite different from telling them to come and play a chill game of pool and have a chat with a few new guys. The idea behind the group is still the same, but we thought it important to communicate with the target audience in their language, in a way that would encourage attendance. Perhaps this gave off the idea that Men in Med wasn’t taking the issue of men’s mental health seriously enough, or that our direction was too aimed too socially for us to make any meaningful change to our attendees mental health. We sincerely apologise if this is the impression that we gave off – we take this matter very seriously, and are equally serious about making a real difference.
At this point it seems appropriate to reiterate the point that Men in Med is an OUMSA Executive led initiative – all the decisions made around the formation and direction of the group have and will continue to be team decisions made by our wonderfully diverse Executive committee.
The feedback we received as a whole has been very positive, and the constructive feedback we have received has reflected a need for more clarity on why we started the group, the specific goals and activities of the group, and how specifically it was going to help. We may have lacked this because the true direction of the group couldn’t be determined until we got it up and running, and could adapt it from there. In response to this, we have decided to put Men in Med under review for a short period of time, so we can come together as an executive and create a more clear and concise vision for Men in Med. More transparency is needed as to what we want to achieve and how we are going to do it. We aren’t giving up on on our mission to improve men’s mental health, but we are taking the time to sit back and think about how we can do it better. We want to take our time with this and do it right, but we are conscious of how little time we have left in the year, and don’t want to spend so much of the year making decisions about how best to run the group, and leave no time at the end to actually run it. So while we review the Men in Med initiative, it will continue to run, focussing more on volunteering opportunities than on social activities. Members of all genders are warmly welcomed to attend these volunteering opportunities. We hope to get out in the community, do some good and start the necessary conversations to improve men’s mental health. We have some opportunities lined up at the Peace Garden on Campus, and at a local kura, both doing basic labouring and beautification jobs. More details about these are to come, and will be advertised on class pages – the more the merrier.
As the Executive, we hope we have made it clear that we have been more than open to receiving all types of feedback, and we continue to encourage this feedback in light of this letter and any upcoming changes that may occur. However, it does concern me that there is some antagonism occurring against people who have placed feedback on improvements and concerns for this initiative; people are well within their rights in doing so.Please know that this antagonism against feedback is in no way supported by the Executive Board or Men in Med as a group – we welcome feedback from every angle and have no tolerance for those who choose to be so narrow-minded that they cannot see two sides of the same coin. We have never claimed Men in Med to be the perfect group, a magic cure or the be-all and end-all of mental health initiatives – but as the creators and leaders of this group we are sitting in a position of definite bias, looking down on Men in Med with rose-tinted glasses. The Executive rely on open and honest feedback to inform our decisions and ensure that we act accordingly.
Thank you to all for your support and feedback throughout this process. We hope we can get to a stage where we are all satisfied with the vision, direction and execution of this initiative.
Otago University Medical Students’ Association Representative