MHM Magazine

While preparing this article, it occurred to me that writing in June offers an opportunity to centralise important themes, causes and initiatives that take place in the last month of the first half of the Georgian calendar. June celebrates International Pride Month which also sharpens focus and promotes men’s mental health. It’s the month for recognising many other initiatives, but fewer seem more important and central to me than this right now. It also occurred to me that men’s health, queer health and protest are siblings. While they can be subject to rivalry over importance and attention, they’re closely related in many aspects. These three subjects also interfere and influence each other, they resemble each other and it’s important to consider them collectively and cohesively. I suggest a written conversation colluding the relative issues while sieving out their unique importance and relevance to each other in a contemporary context. Pride Month, which is tragically not recognised as a global movement and currently only officiated in a handful of countries, has a sensitive, complex and indispensable history, and place in history and contemporary socio-political (and personal) debates. It would be misguided and disingenuous to attempt to present a history here. However, Pride Month as a movement, especially when it occurs in concurrence or coincidence as Men’s Mental Health Month, allows for an introductory emphasis on queer mental health. If this were a full academic article, there would need to be a discussion on the potential to perpetuate exclusion and alienation of the full and expanding ambit of the queer community – often considered represented under within the acronym; LGBTQIA+. However, this is not such a document and is instead intended to be a conduit for continued and broadened social discourse and possibly, sensitivity, empathy and recognition inter alia. It’s hopefully a loose model to encourage the proliferation of more such discussions, debates and dissertations related to the mental state, mental health and overall wellbeing of the queer community, and a protest against many things against this. It’s also rhetorical though important to disclaim that there does not exist ‘one queer community’ and homogeneity is a myth in this regard. There is little doubt the last decades and perhaps more so than ever since the pandemic and ockdowns that ensued that have seen the raising of the importance PRIDE MONTH AND MENTAL HEALTH EDITORIAL Zamo Mbele Clinical psychologist and consultant Johannesburg Issue 3 | 2022 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 1 MHM