It is 3am. A man in his forties is awake again. He has not slept properly for a fortnight. He is short with his team, drinking a little more than he used to, and has stopped returning calls from his oldest friend. He has noticed none of this. His employer has an EAP. He will not be calling them
In the year to June 2025, 75% of NZ suicide deaths were men (474 of 630). The suicide rate for tāne Māori is about 1.5 times the national male rate. For tāne Māori aged 25 to 44 it is more than three times higher, the most concentrated risk group in the country. Suicide is now the leading cause of death for young men aged 15 to 34 in Aotearoa.
Men’s Health Week, 15 to 21 June, is the moment HR teams across NZ will be asked once again what their organisations are doing for the men in their workforce. The thoughtful answer is not more posters. The thoughtful answer is to look at the design of the workplace.
For context: I am one of two male psychologists running a workplace wellbeing firm together. When I finished my clinical training there were two men in my final-year cohort of around twenty. That is not unusual. Neither of us claims men’s mental health as our specialism. We have, however, thought about the gap a lot, because the gap is hard to miss.
There is a fair argument that men, as a group, ought to be more comfortable asking for help. That argument is not wrong. There is real work to do there. It is a longer-game shift. The workplaces and the lives of the men inside them cannot afford to wait for it.
What HR can do, with the men currently in the workforce, sits in four places. Underneath all four is the principle Sir Mason Durie articulated as te Whare Tapa Whā in 1982: the four walls of the whare (te taha tinana, te taha hinengaro, te taha whānau, te taha wairua) are interdependent. You do not address one in isolation. The four moves below are applications of that principle to the workplace.
1. Recognise what people actually present with
It starts with what you look for. Most managers, in NZ workplaces and elsewhere, have been trained to spot the classical signs of depression and anxiety: sadness, tearfulness, visible worry, panic. Those presentations are more common in women. Many men who are clinically depressed look irritable, withdrawn, drinking more, working longer hours, taking risks they would once have stopped to think about. Anxious men often look like the over-committed ones: workload ramped up, sleep going, jaw clenched, snappy with the team, jumping at decisions they used to take in their stride. Same conditions, different presentation.
2. Treat coaching like physio
Then there is the offer itself. Most NZ workplaces hand staff an 0800 number, a brochure, and maybe an EAP provider. A lot of men hand the brochure back. They will, however, see the physio. The way to reach more of them is to reframe what is offered in the language they already accept: performance, recovery, capability. A coach you see every month is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of someone serious about their work. This is not about renaming therapy to make men feel manlier. It is about removing the deficit framing that shapes how the offer currently arrives.
3. Lead from the top, visibly
Leadership is the other lever, and the cheapest. One senior leader saying “I see my coach every month” outperforms a quarter of the wellness comms budget. Visible vulnerability at the top is one of the foundational ways teams come to feel safe enough to talk about anything that matters. Mental health is no exception. If your CEO will not say it, the help-seeking shift does not come. If they will, you have something usable.
4. Design it in, not bolt it on
The last piece is structural. Integrated approaches that change both the work itself and the support around it outperform standalone wellness programmes. Mental health belongs alongside ergonomics, fatigue, and exposure on the workplace’s risk register, not in a separate wellness pillar. WorkSafe’s psychosocial guidance treats it that way, and so does ISO 45003. The internal weight a workplace gives this should match.
None of this is an argument against pushing hard at work. Pushing yourself, finding your limits, doing demanding work well are all part of a good working life. I find this in my own work. I will push, then push too far, end up working hard but not well, and have to be reminded there is a better way. The point is that the workplaces that catch that moment design for it. They expect it. They build a way through.
The men who would most benefit from this design will not be the ones asking for it. They will be the ones whose sleep has gone, who are short with their teams, who are drinking a little more than they used to. They will be the ones who, like the man awake at 3am, have not noticed any of it. The design that catches them is the only one that will. Men’s Health Week is a useful reminder that the design is ours to build.
Sean Versteegh is a clinical psychologist and co-CEO of 3 Big Things.
