How often do you talk about mental health with friends?
Plus, a short note on a long week
Last week, Pew Research Center published a report on friendship in the U.S. The report had a few notable findings, but one I wanted to highlight was what people say they talk about with their friends.
According to this report, work is the most popular conversation topic between close friends, with 61% of women and 54% of men reporting that work comes up often or extremely often in conversation.
Out of curiosity, I just scrolled through the eight most recent conversations I’ve had. Sure enough, six of the eight were about work.
By contrast, the least popular topic in this report? Mental health. Only 31% of women say that mental health comes up often in their conversations, and that number drops to 15% among men.
There’s a lot of reasons why you might rarely talk about mental health with friends, and not discussing mental health with friends isn’t automatically a bad thing. But there are benefits to talking about our feelings, and there are some not-so-great societal reasons that sometimes keep us from doing it.
Stigma is one of these reasons. I wrote about this as it pertains to the comparison between loneliness and smoking, and it’s an issue that will warrant a whole newsletter of its own at some point, because it’s a powerful force in mental and physical health alike.Â
Putting our problems into words can be therapeutic. But you don’t have to be in distress to talk about mental health – it’s something we benefit from being open about in general. Just because you’re doing well now doesn’t mean you won’t encounter rough patches down the road, and we never know what people around us might be quietly going through.
So, on a not-so-unrelated note:
Like many of you, I’ve had a challenging week, which means I wasn’t able to make space for this newsletter the way I normally do.
This is a first in the three months since I started writing this, and I can guarantee it won’t be the last time that life gets in the way. But my goal is always to check in with you once a week, even if it’s just a brief share – because, at the end of the day, I want this newsletter to be about staying connected.Â
We’ll dive back into talking with friends about mental health down the road (I was excited to share this Pew report with you, even though I didn’t get to really explore it with you this time). I’m eager to talk more about friendship, stigma, masculinity, a whole bunch of stuff from this report alone.
For now, just know that whatever your week has looked like, I’m thinking of you! Thanks for being here, and I’ll be back with more next week.