This book explores contemporary cultural narratives across film, television, and literature to illuminate the way male mental illness is positioned. It argues that fundamentally, the male experience is shaped differently due to the impact of gender expectations. Alongside this, narratives containing suicide also often fail to address the experiential, focusing on the why instead. This results in a limited approach that upholds hegemonic ideals, and with it, a need to rationalize or explain mental health and suicide, rather than engage with it more empathetically.

Christina Wilkins is Lecturer in Film and Creative Writing at University of Birmingham, UK. She has published three previous books with Palgrave: Religion and Identity in Post 9/11 Vampire Narratives: God is (un)dead (2018), Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body (2022) and Authenticity and Adaptation (2025). She is the co-founder of the Mental Health Humanities Researcher Network.