A good segment of American men are lonely. Around 30% say they feel disconnected from their communities and don’t have anyone to talk to about it.
A December report by Utah-based conservative think tank the Sutherland Institute and Y2 Analytics looked into the issues facing men and boys and found a deepening disconnect on things like mental health and overall meaning.
It found that 15% of Utah men say they don’t have anyone they can really talk to about their mental health, compared to 30% nationally. On the flip side, 66% of Utah men believe it’s less acceptable for men to discuss mental health struggles than for women. Nationally, most men believe it’s OK to talk about their experiences.
Additionally, as of 2023, men are approximately four times as likely to die by suicide as women.
On the whole, the situation is better in Utah, but it’s still cause for concern for state leaders. It’s something Gov. Spencer Cox called a "critical discussion" at a Jan. 8 symposium on the report’s findings.
“A few years ago, I started getting very concerned about the data we were seeing in Utah,” he said at the event. “We are in challenging times, and these challenging times have been going on for quite some time. We live in a time where the culture wars are at the forefront of everything that we're trying to accomplish.”
Cox has put state resources into the issue with the Task Force on the Wellbeing of Men and Boys, which is working closely with the Sutherland Institute.
For the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, Melissa Deckman, modern factors like social media and the internet mean young men today face unique challenges.
“They're suffering mental health issues that kind of are newer to this generation,” she said. “They're also suffering from social isolation, and we see a growing gender gap among young Americans.”
That gender gap extends to politics, too. In the 2024 presidential election, men under the age of 30 favored Donald Trump by 14 percentage points, while women of the same age supported Kamala Harris by a margin of 17 points.
However, in elections held in 2025, many young men instead voted for Democrats. In Deckman’s view, that showcases how distinct issues motivate young men, namely, the economy.
“Our analysis shows that after the [2024] election, the main reason that people gave for voting for Trump, and especially young people, including more young men than young women, was economic,” she said. “I think, to me, that’s just an indication, for young men in particular, that their votes are far more up for grabs coming into the 2026 midterms and beyond.”
One thing that could be fueling that gender divide, said Deckman, is social media algorithms that feed different people different types of content.
“Young men and young women are listening to different things,” she said. “They're talking past one another. And so a lot of people are concerned that some young men are really being socially isolated, on the one hand, but even maybe worse, prone to falling for some extremist kind of politics.”
That’s something YMCA of Northern Utah CEO Richard West agrees with.
“I would say in today's point in time, and for this generation, it is easier for [men and boys] to isolate themselves and disappear and become more distrustful and have a distorted view of what a future looks like for them,” he said.
The perils of social media — for both boys and girls — are not lost on Utah leaders, as the state has instituted phone bans in public schools and led the charge to sue social media companies.
For the governor, recognizing the disconnect men and boys are experiencing transcends politics.
“We will have that debate about what we think are the reasons behind how we got here and where we need to go from here, but we are here,” Cox said. “The facts are pretty clear on that, and the facts aren't conservative, the facts aren't progressive, the facts are the facts.”
Deckman is in the same boat. Simple recognition is an important step in solving the problem.
“I think it's a good thing to have both Democrats and Republicans looking at young men,” she said. “Because my fear is that left unabated, you have a situation where algorithms will send them to sites that essentially paint the narrative that they are being victimized in society, and it will lead to some not-so-great potential outcomes.”
On a more personal level, West thinks the easiest way to improve the prospects of men and boys right now is individual engagement.
“When we see real growth with anybody, but with boys especially, is when they're trusted with responsibility and when they're given leadership roles and are able to show that they matter and that they can build confidence, their engagement changes dramatically,” he said. “It's that third-party influence and engagement, that ability to not let them just disappear into what is comfortable.”
He said one of the activities where they see the most growth is overnight camping, where boys are spending time away from their family unit and are “living in a community where they need to be responsible and accountable to each other.”
Moving forward, West said the challenges facing young men are everywhere, but Utah is in better shape to face them than others.
“We have a younger population, and we also have pretty strong community institutions which give an opportunity to respond early and to engage earlier,” he said, pointing to Utah’s strong religious and civic institutions.
For Cox, the goal of aiming to better the prospects of men and boys is not to favor one gender over the other, something he said he has “taken some arrows” over in the past.
“You know, the eye rolls. ‘Of course, we're focusing on men and boys. They're doing great, you know, look at the board rooms, look at our elected officials in Utah,’’ he said. “And yet, as you saw from the data, there is a subset, and that's where we have to focus. We don't want anyone to lose their life because of economic disadvantage or because they have a lack of purpose in their lives.”
