The Manosphere, Mental Health, and the Crisis of Violence: What Our Boys and Men Are Listening To

As we observe Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month this June, the recurring narrative or assumption is that men are suffering in silence. We often assume that because young men and even older men are not sitting in therapy chairs, they are not seeking help and guidance. But as we have heard from the men sharing their stories with us this week (You can check out our Instagram and TikTok channels); men are opening up about the cost of staying silent, sharing tips on how support looks like, and fighting for emotional safety. Our men are therefore not silent, at least not entirely. They are actively searching for ways to handle their mental health, taking it One Step at a Time, Progress not Perfection, as this year's theme urges us to do.

Now that we have established that men are listening and are looking for support, have we looked closely at who holds the microphone? Who they are listening to? For many of us, the dark reality of the manosphere forcefully entered our consciousness through recent acclaimed series and documentaries. Projects like Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere exposed how online influencers capitalize on 'red-pilled' rhetoric to build aggressive, ultra-masculine networks that shape how young men view gender and power. Then there was the Netflix series Adolescence that gave us a terrifying look at how these male-supremacist and misogynistic beliefs target young boys and teenagers, influencing violence against women. It was a global wake-up call that algorithms are, in many ways, raising our boys.

I hope we do not see this as a distant, Western internet phenomenon of the likes of Andrew Tate and far removed from our reality. This is happening even here at home through controversial voices like Andrew Kibe and Twitter personality Amerix.

In order to understand how to help our young men, we first have to understand why they are flocking to these spaces. The youth are navigating difficult realities: economic instability, their identity in a changed world and a society that demands he be a provider in an economy with few jobs. Many feel lost, emasculated, and invisible. So when a voice on Twitter or TikTok speaks to his pain, they offer what feels like a lifeline: order, brotherhood, and a blueprint for respect.

When you see the initial hooks from these individual influencers, the entry point frequently masquerades as tough-love health advice: hit the gym, drop the processed sugars, lose the fat, and build physical discipline. On the surface, this is solid, actionable advice. However, as a Clinical Psychologist, I see the bait-and-switch. This physical and nutritional advice is frequently used as a trojan horse for highly destructive psychological conditioning.

Soon enough the messaging pivots from self-improvement to emotional starvation. Young men are taught that vulnerability is a weakness, that empathy is a flaw, and that the only acceptable masculine emotion is anger. They are fed a steady diet of hyper-independence and stoicism. More dangerously, they are taught that their success as men is tied to their ability to dominate, control, and subjugate women.

And this brings us to a devastating reality. We cannot talk about the psychological conditioning of men in these digital echo chambers without confronting the rise of intimate partner violence and femicide happening right now in Kenya. And tragically, this aggression does not stop with women; it is spilling over onto our most vulnerable, children. We are now witnessing an alarming and heartbreaking surge in the violent kidnapping and killing of children in our country.

Femicide and violence against children is not just a criminal justice issue; it is a psychological crisis. When you take a generation of young men who are frustrated economically and emotionally starved, and you feed them a daily algorithm that objectifies and dehumanizes women, you create a powder keg. If a man is culturally and digitally conditioned to believe that he is entitled to a woman’s submission, and he possesses no psychological tools to process the normal human emotions of rejection, shame, or inadequacy, his internal pain will inevitably externalize. Because he has been taught that sadness or hurt are weaknesses, his brain automatically converts that pain into the only emotion he is allowed to feel: rage.

And so when a relationship ends, or when he feels disrespected, he does not have the emotional vocabulary to process the grief. Instead, he perceives it as a threat to his masculine identity. In the darkest, most tragic cases, this inability to process emotional pain, combined with the normalized dehumanization of women learned in the manosphere, soon escalates into violence. Violence with fatal consequences. I therefore propose that femicide is the extreme, fatal endpoint of untreated male trauma and toxic socialization.

Should we then merely point fingers at these content creators and tell our sons not to listen? That our men should avoid these influencer? The manosphere exists because as a society we have failed to provide a healthier alternative. Nature abhors a vacuum. If we do not provide safe and empathetic spaces for men to process their fears of failure, their financial anxieties, and their relationship struggles, the algorithm will gladly raise them for us.

We have to build better communities. We must teach our boys that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of masculinity; it is the cornerstone of resilience. In fact I dare say that it is human. Strength is not the ability to suppress your emotions or dominate a partner; true strength is the courage to sit with your pain, understand it, and heal it without causing harm to others.

And so in this month of June, as we raise awareness on men's mental health, let us also check on the content of the online diets our boys and men are consuming. Let us think of it as intentionally as we think of the meals they consume.

At Iyashi Wellness Centre, we are committed to providing safe, non-judgmental spaces for everyone. It is possible to unlearn destructive coping mechanisms, build psychological resilience, and learn how to foster connected, safe relationships.