Men in Mind for Primary Care Nurses
Men in Mind is an online training program built to help primary care professionals get the most out of every interaction with a male patient.
Part of Movember's work to change the face of men’s health, the course draws on leading research, the lived experience of men and primary care knowledge to unpack how masculinity shapes the way men seek help, communicate and engage in care.
The course is the first of its kind worldwide.
How to navigate this course
Click each section below to see the button it refers to light up. Give it a try.
Frequently asked questions
Select any question to expand the answer.
At the start of the course's final module, you'll be asked to enter your certificate details. Once you complete that module, your certificate will be ready to print, download, or email to yourself. We'll also automatically send your completion details to your governing body.
Absolutely! We know you may need to have breaks or get interrupted. That said, leaving the module 'idle' for too long may result in problems with the course registering as completed and you will need to start again. All you need to do is exit the course by selecting the X in the top right-hand corner. This will save your place and pick up where you left off next time.
The full course is made up of 3 sections, which take approximately 2.5 hours in total to complete.
If you run into any problems, don't fret! Feel free to email learning@movember.com with a screenshot or description of the problem you're having and we'll do everything we can to help, as quickly as we can.
Just a pair of headphones if you want to listen to any of the video content with sound. All videos are captioned so you can listen without sound. The course can be completed on your laptop, desktop computer or even your phone.
Whenever you see a "MOUSTACHES LOVE RESEARCH" panel or a highlighted link, it contains a citation or external resource you can open to read more. This is entirely optional, and there's a full list of references and additional resources on the final screen for you to email or keep.
Absolutely not! Throughout the course you'll be given a heap of optional content including educational videos, external links, case studies and journal articles. None of these are mandatory.
We also reference our supporting evidence constantly, which you can review if you're interested. Consume the optional learning at your own pace, or not at all. Don't worry about saving content as you go — there's a library of all the resources at the end of the module.
This module is designed to work with standard screen readers, including JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver. Interactive elements are keyboard navigable, videos have transcripts, and you can adjust the text size, switch to night mode, or turn on reduced motion using the settings (gear) button.
If you experience any accessibility issues, please contact learning@movember.com.
Acknowledgement of Country
This course was created in Melbourne, on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, with input from practitioners, researchers and community experts across Australia.
Movember acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and the many Countries on which this work was shaped. We recognise the continuing connection to land, waters, community and culture, and the enduring knowledge systems of health, healing and care. We pay our respect to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Men just like me are falling through the cracks of our health system.
The statistics are stark with two in five Australian men dying prematurely, resulting in a life expectancy four years younger than women.
Here's what matters most. These deaths are largely preventable, but prevention only works where men are engaged and motivated to change.
This course gives you the tools to do exactly that — to keep men in the system, getting the support they need.
Learning outcomes
This course builds on the skills and experience you already bring to your practice, helping you apply them more effectively when working with male patients in the community.
At the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Identify how your own gender socialisation and assumptions can shape clinical work with men.
- Outline how masculinities and life-stage transitions shape men's engagement with primary care.
- Describe a range of strengths-based communication and engagement approaches that work with rather than against masculine identity.
- Identify male-typical presentations of depression and suicidality, including somatic, externalising and behavioural indicators that may not align with standard diagnostic prototypes.
- Identify practical response strategies that complement existing clinical skills when working with men experiencing depression or suicidality.
Gender is a social determinant of health
Gender shapes health outcomes across the population. On average, men die before women, while women spend a greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability. Trans and non-binary people experience disproportionately worse health outcomes than the general population. None of these things are acceptable.
Our work at the Movember Institute focuses on improving health outcomes for men globally. That's why this course focuses on men. The evidence base for engaging male patients well has distinct features that are practical, learnable and grounded in what we know about how masculinities shape healthcare encounters. It sits inside a broader movement for gender-responsive healthcare that acknowledges and addresses the different needs of women, men and non-binary people.
The opportunity is now
Treating a man as a man has gone by the wayside. So you're like, "Oh, yeah, I'll just treat this condition because that's the default." But you're not actually treating the man. Whereas we have women's health, and women's health is very holistic and encapsulating, all of that sort of the gender-affirming side of things, but men's health doesn't really have that yet. Men have different healthcare needs as opposed to just being default patient on a stick body.
He kept coming back to see me for a number of visits. I was a safe space for him because we'd already brought that up, and he didn't have to and didn't want to bring that up with the doctor. "Oh, yeah, the doctor doesn't have time for that. The doctor won't need to hear about that." So, it was a safe space for him with me.
As we know, the greatest risk to a male from age of 15 to 45 is suicide. So, these are considerations that you have in the back of your head when you see someone.
Our nurses are incredibly trusted professionals. What I consistently hear from my patients is that if I call them, they worry. Something's gone wrong. A GP wouldn't call me unless there was a problem. But if the practice nurse calls them, it represents health. Someone's checking in from a preventative background. They're checking in from a wellbeing space.
There's a gentleman that I seen, and he kept complaining of shortness of breath. This was over six months, and he kept coming back to see me as opposed to the GP because we had that engagement. We sent him off for heart tests, and he ended up being flown down to Sydney, had to have, I think, a quadruple bypass. And he still now tells everyone that I saved his life. Those sorts of things are the moments that count.
Getting men through the door is only the first step. What happens next is the real frontier of men's health.
Two in five Australian men die prematurely, before they turn 75.
That's more than 37,000 fathers, brothers, sons and mates every year, most from largely preventable conditions (AIHW, 2023).
They're already showing up
Men are engaging with the healthcare system. Almost 8 in 10 (79%) Australian men aged 15 and over visited a GP in the previous 12 months (AIHW, 2023). Most will access a healthcare service or present with a concern at some point in their lives.
But despite this contact, outcomes remain consistently poorer across a range of preventable conditions. In 2023, more than half of all deaths in Australian males under 75 were potentially avoidable. Suicide was the second-leading cause, behind coronary heart disease (AIHW, 2024).
Most men who die by suicide are already connecting with the healthcare system.
of Australian males who died by suicide accessed at least one health service, mostly through Medicare-funded services.
2010–2017 79% MBS funded service vs. 48% hospital (AIHW, 2024)
This is where your time with him matters. And the consensus is clear for primary care nurses role in men's health to grow. You bring a more open, patient-centred style to the room. A nurse visit feels different, too: it's routine, not about sickness or weakness, so his guard comes down. He comes in for something ordinary and ends up saying more than the appointment was booked for.
When it works, it opens the door to earlier intervention. When it falls short, men come back later, somewhere else, with more complex needs. The downstream costs are significant:
- Three in four suicide deaths in Australia are men (ABS, 2025).
- In Australia, an average of six men die by suicide every day (ABS, 2025).
- Each suicide has a ripple effect impacting on average 135 people directly (Cerel et al., 2019).
The opportunity is now
For years the burden has been on men to show up, speak up, seek help. The evidence is clear. That doesn't work. The leverage sits with nurses who think differently. You're one of them.
Dr Zac Seidler
Hi, I'm Zac Seidler, clinical psychologist and the Global Director of Men's Health Research at Movember. I've dedicated my academic and professional career to understanding men's mental health and masculinity and the role they play in health outcomes across the globe.
Despite the old adage that men don't seek help, we know that most men will interact with the healthcare system at some point. But what we've learned over the years is that this contact doesn't always translate into better outcomes.
Many men care deeply about their health, but they don't always engage with healthcare in ways our systems expect. When this happens, important opportunities to detect issues early, start treatment, or stay connected to care can be missed.
This course is designed to help us better understand why this happens — and what we can do about it. We'll do that by looking at three things.
First, how expectations around being a man develop over the life course, and how these ideas can shape the way many men approach their health.
Then, what we can do about it in everyday practice — evidence-based strategies you can draw on straight away to strengthen engagement and support better outcomes for men and boys in your care.
And finally, how all of this plays out in men's mental health — an area where the stakes are high, and where distress can hide in plain sight.
The course draws on our leading research from the Movember Institute, alongside lived experiences shared by men and healthcare professionals.
The evidence is clear: a single clinical encounter can shape a man's relationship with healthcare for years. Let's make the most of it.
The plan
- Part 1: Reframing masculinity
What shapes the way men think about health and help-seeking and why it can impact your practice. - Part 2: Meet him where he's at
Strengths-based, evidence-informed strategies for improving engagement with male patients, including the MALE framework. - Part 3: Hiding in plain sight
How anxiety, depression and suicidality can present differently in men and how to identify and respond to presentations that standard screening tools often miss.
Ready?
Let's start with Part 1: Reframing masculinity.
I went feeling vulnerable. I left feeling empowered.
Brad, 44
Part 1: Reframing masculinity
1.1 A backpack of bricks
He's got his sleeve up before you've even got the tourniquet on. "Will this take long? I'm late for work." No small talk, in and out.
Is he being rude or is something else going on here?
Being a man comes with unspoken rules: what to do, how to feel, when to ask for help, when to push through. These rules don't come from nowhere. They build up over time, shaped by family, friends, culture and media. One way to picture it: imagine masculinity as a backpack.
Dr Zac Seidler
To understand how cultural and societal expectations shape men's behaviour, it can be useful to think about masculinity as a backpack. Every man is handed one at birth and carries it through life.
Inside each man's backpack are different configurations of bricks — and each brick represents an expectation or understanding about what it means to be a man. Those messages aren't inherently good or bad. Some will serve him well. Others can make life harder. Most of them are useful sometimes and restrictive at others, but nonetheless, most guys carry these bricks, often unaware, into all situations.
Across the lifespan, men are handed these bricks through everyday experiences with family, friends, school, work, media and culture. Sometimes the man knows the brick is being placed in their backpack, but often they don't. Let's look at a few examples.
Imagine a young boy who falls over and starts to cry. His father quickly tells him to "don't cry mate, you'll be alright." In that moment, the boy receives a message that men shouldn't show emotion. The brick he picks up might be that masculinity is synonymous with stoicism, resilience, or self-reliance. That's one brick in the backpack.
Now imagine a teenager who constantly sees messages online suggesting that successful men are fit, ripped, rich, and always in control. Here, he may pick up a brick about dominance, being a lone wolf, or the alpha in the room. Another brick goes into the backpack.
Sometimes the messages are more subtle. Imagine a young boy choosing a pink toy from the toy store. The adults around him switch it for a blue one. In that moment, he may pick up a brick about what boys should not be — reinforcing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and belonging.
This is clearly a simplified way of thinking about masculinity. These "bricks" aren't formed through single experiences but rather through multiple interactions that all reinforce a single expectation. Over time, this builds something much bigger.
Because when men walk into healthcare settings, they bring more than just symptoms or concerns. They bring a lifetime of experiences, expectations and pressures about what it means to be a man that all play out in front of you. Those experiences can shape how comfortable someone feels asking for help, talking about their concerns, or accepting support.
Keeping that in mind can help us make better sense of what's happening in the interaction and respond more thoughtfully. Because when a man seems guarded, brief, unsure or reluctant to go further, it's unlikely to be that he has a lack of interest in care. Instead, it likely reflects the messages he has carried for years about coping, control, emotions and what it means to be a man. Our role is to understand what he may be carrying and work with it to support him.
These bricks are handed to men over a lifetime. Researchers call them 'traditional masculine norms'. They usually include:
Select each brick to learn more.
Pick up a brick
Select any expectation on the right to learn more.
Think about the men in your life. Do any of these ideas seem familiar?
Masculinities unpacked
None of this is a criticism of men or of masculinity.
Masculinities — the plural is deliberate — are built by culture, not biology. They look different across communities, generations and individuals. They aren't only performed by men and they aren't all harmful. The same brick that teaches a boy to push through pain can serve him well in some moments and cost him dearly in others. The point isn't to throw masculinity out. It's to understand where these rules come from and when they help or harm.
The ‘right’ kind of man
Masculinities also exist in relation to each other. There's always a version treated as the 'right' kind of man in a given setting and others ranked below it. That's why the backpack looks different depending on where a man grew up and what he learned would earn him respect.
Think of a time you felt pressure to behave (or not behave) a certain way because of your gender. Where did that pressure come from? What did you think would happen if you didn't go along with it?
Context changes everything
Think about a man crying. At a grand final when his team wins, it's accepted, even expected. In your treatment room, or during a community visit that same man may feel deep shame or sense he's being judged. The behaviour is identical. What's changed is the setting and the circumstances.
Write a short list of situations where men often feel comfortable to show their emotions (such as male athletes after a big win).
Write a short list of situations where men might be uncomfortable showing their emotions. What is different about these situations and why?
Modern masculinities
These rules aren't fixed.
Most men today hold views that are more progressive than in the past. But many still assume society expects them to be the traditional stereotype. Men end up performing a version of masculinity they don't fully believe in, because they assume everyone else does.
Choose a man in your life whose behaviour sometimes aligns with traditional masculine norms and at other times, does not reflect these norms. Why might he lean on traditional masculinity in one setting, but not another?
It's never just gender
Masculinities don't work in isolation.
They interact with race, class, sexuality, disability, immigration history and other parts of a man's life. The same norm can land very differently depending on who he is and his context.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, culture is a protective factor, and connection to Country, family, kinship and community, cultural identity and self-determination are all sources of strength, resilience and wellbeing. At the same time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men face the worst health outcomes of any group in Australia, shaped by the intersection of gendered norms, structural racism, historical dispossession and geographic disadvantage.
Men from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds may face cultural values that compound masculine barriers to help-seeking. Research shows that in some communities, admitting the need for help is experienced as "losing face" or "weakness," with help-seeking seen as culturally foreign.
Rural and regional men face a double barrier: stoicism has been shown to increase with distance from metropolitan areas, compounded by limited service availability, long travel times and high out-of-pocket costs.
Men in high-disadvantage areas are significantly more likely to experience barriers to healthcare than those in low-disadvantage areas.
Avoid assuming that the same approach will work for every man. Ask what matters to him, who he would like involved and what support would feel appropriate in his cultural, family and community context.
The man across from you is never just 'a man'. He's shaped by the intersection of his gender with everything else that has defined his life.
Just a starting point
This introductory course covers the fundamentals of masculinities — the norms and patterns that show up across most men's lives. We start here because it gives us a way into understanding one layer of the bricks men carry and how that layer can shape their healthcare. The previous examples show how those norms meet other identities, but no two men carry these layers the same way. Treat them as a starting point for ongoing development.
1.2 Not one man, but many
Masculinities don't look the same across a man's life.
What stops a 22-year-old from speaking up looks different from what weighs on a 55-year-old and different again at 70. Treat traditional masculinities as a starting point, not a default.
Select each life stage to reveal more.
In their teens and early twenties, men are working out who they are as men. Their friends and family are watching this process closely, adding a layer of pressure which is unique to this developmental period. For many young men, asking for help feels like the opposite of becoming the kind of man they want to be. Bringing up a mental health or sexual health concern can feel like failing, not like a sensible thing to do.
Young men also rely on friends, partners and family for advice, more than they rely on doctors or nurses. When they do come in, they may not know what they're supposed to do or say. A bad first experience can put them off for decades. But the opposite is just as true: a good experience can shape how they engage with healthcare for the rest of their lives.
By midlife, many men see themselves first as providers, partners and parents. Work and family come first. Their own health comes last.
Across the working years, around one in four Australian men put off seeing a GP when they need to (ABS, 2025). That number barely moves from a man's mid-20s to his mid-50s. By this stage, years of putting things off start to show up. Chronic conditions, heart risk and mental health problems often arrive late and worse than they should be.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Patient experiences in Australia 2024–25.
Big life moments, like becoming a father, moving in with a partner or losing a parent, often shift things: they provide an opportunity for engagement with care but also present other unique pressures to attend to. Fatherhood provides a strong example. In a 2026 Movember survey of more than 1,200 Australian fathers, 44% reported attending a health check-up since becoming a dad that they might otherwise have skipped (Wilson et al., 2026). Three quarters said fatherhood had sharpened their focus on both physical and mental health.
In older men, decades of stoicism and self-reliance have settled in, making new symptoms harder to talk about. Retirement strips away a big part of who they've been, social contact shrinks and loneliness grows. This creates a vulnerability the patient is unlikely to name.
The stakes are high as several factors combine:
- Close to one in five Australian men say they're socially isolated (AIHW, 2022).
- Most people who outlive their spouse are women. So older men often grieve alone, without the support networks that might help them through it.
- Older men experience the highest rates of suicide of any age group.
Reflect on three men in your life. One young, one middle-aged and one older male.
What are some of the unique age-related masculine pressures each of them felt? How might these have interacted with their healthcare journey?
1.3 Flying blind
Masculinities shape more than help-seeking.
They also shape what men know about their own health and how confident they are using that knowledge. Many men arrive at the clinic without the basic health knowledge most women picked up as teenagers.
The health literacy gap
Most women start dealing with healthcare early. Contraception, periods, cervical screening, pregnancy. From their teens onwards, they're in and out of pharmacies, clinics, GP rooms regularly. Over time, they get familiar with the system. They learn how to ask questions. They learn what to expect.
Most men don't get that same scaffolded exposure to healthcare. There's no socially acceptable reason for a young man to see a GP, fill a script or follow up a referral; it's typically associated with illness or injury.
The gap is measurable. Men consistently score lower than women on health literacy: finding health information, understanding it and acting on it. The more male-dominated the workplace, the lower the scores.
The consequences are significant:
- Lower use of preventive care and screening
- More presentations to emergency departments
- Higher mortality rates and greater care costs
- Showing up later, with more advanced illness
The double bind
Being told to "tough it out" makes the health literacy gap worse. A man who's been taught not to admit weakness is unlikely to admit he doesn't understand what a test is for or that he's not sure if his symptom is serious. In your room, this is the man who nods along when you explain a new care plan, asks no questions and walks out without really knowing what he's been told.
It's also passed down. When fathers don't go to the GP, sons don't see help-seeking modelled. The cycle keeps going.
When a man comes in late, says little and asks no questions, ask yourself: is this disinterest or is this someone who was never shown how to do this?
Hear it from him
The research tells us one thing, the men behind it tell us another.
Brad
So, I was raised believing that as a masculine man, I had to tough it out. I had to do it alone. I had to do it in silence because that was strength.
My ex-wife was a nurse. She defaulted as the health professional. For those 14 years married, she was my advocate. She would act as not only my advocate to the doctor, but also would translate what the doctor was saying back to me — and would essentially make those health decisions for me.
After the divorce, I lost that advocate. I didn't have that training. I wasn't a nurse, I wasn't a doctor. I didn't speak the same language. I was a bloke in an enforcement role. I didn't have words for other than — I don't feel right, there's a pain in my knee. It was simple, basic language, and it didn't allow me to communicate or to advocate for myself.
And the doctors I was encountering at the time weren't curious enough to overcome that language barrier. There was a disconnect between what I was saying and what they were saying, and that didn't lead to good outcomes. So, I was either disenfranchised with the medical professional and I would go away until the symptoms would become worse. Minor ailments would become major ailments. I missed the opportunity to prevent worsening of conditions.
Having the ability to accurately describe what's going on in your body, be it physical, be it emotional, it allows you the opportunity to engage early and get help.
I've invested that time. I've overcome that uncomfortable, that awkward sense of not knowing and now I'm comfortable to walk into any doctor's situation, any nurse. Fight for my rights at the pharmacy.
Think about the men you see in your day-to-day. How many would know what to ask, where to go or what to do with their care if you didn't talk them through it? How many read through the information you've given them?
1.4 Boys don't cry
Big boys don't cry. Most men heard some version of it before they were old enough to question it: showing you're hurt is weakness and weakness is something you hide.
The problem is, "boys don't cry" gives us a single story of men's health: that men don't seek help. It's not wrong, but it's incomplete. Barriers to healthcare for men operate at three points:
- The first is access — getting a man through the door.
- The second is engagement — what happens once he's there.
- The third is retention – keeping them coming back when they need it.
Getting through the door
Many men have been taught to push through pain, sort things out themselves and not show how they're feeling. These habits don't disappear when something goes wrong with their health.
- They make it harder to ask for help and
- They make asking for help feel like a kind of failure
The masculinities that make him more likely to need care are the same masculinities that make seeking care feel like failing. Some men feel this so strongly that they say the idea of being seen as weak is worse than the idea of being dead.
Here's what that means for you. Many men don't walk in ready to talk about how they're really doing. He comes for something physical and routine, because that's the reason that feels allowed. He may say little, and he may downplay why he's here. But by the time he's in front of you it's rarely a small thing:
- 60% of Australian men will wait more than 7 days with symptoms before seeing a doctor.
- 30% will wait more than a month.
- 9% will wait more than two years (Movember, 2024).
Getting him through the door isn't the job, he's already here. The better questions are why now and what can we do with it?
Staying in the room
Many men who make contact are being lost.
Two in three Australian men report gender stereotypes have affected their health behaviours and experiences in healthcare settings (Movember, 2024). Lack of personal connection is the primary driver of male disengagement — more than cost, logistics or stigma.
This is where masculinities matter most clinically. Not as an explanation for why men don't show up, but as a way of understanding what happens when they do.
"You're not treated as delicately, I guess. You're a tough guy. You can deal with it."
Evan, 52 years
Getting him back
of Australian men have either left a healthcare practitioner or wanted to, mostly because they didn't feel a personal connection (Movember, 2024).
A man who walks away feeling the system isn't built for him, that he isn't understood as a man or that he had to translate himself to be heard, is less likely to come back when he needs to.
1.5 What's in your backpack?
So far, this module has focused on the men you see in your work. What they carry. How it shapes what they say, what they don't and whether they come back. But there's a second backpack in the room. It belongs to you.
Every practitioner brings their own beliefs and assumptions about the people they treat. Some you can see. Many you can't. They came from family, culture, training, experience and the world you grew up in. Gender is one of the strongest and one of the hardest to see in yourself, because it's everywhere.
This isn't a criticism. It's not unique to any type of practitioner. The research is clear: cultural norms shape how we judge people, often without us noticing.
No one is exempt. The question isn't whether you hold gender-related assumptions. It's which ones and where they show up.
Take a moment before reading on. Reflect on yourself and your own gender development. This exercise is known as a 'gender role analysis'. Use the questions below as a guide:
- What defined your early ideas of your gender and who influenced it?
- What defines your gender now?
- Over time, what have you come to accept or reject about your gender role?
1.6 Clash of the bricks
The man in front of you is carrying his backpack. You're carrying yours. The space where they meet is where bias quietly takes shape — not through conscious prejudice, but through what feels normal, what goes unquestioned.
It comes back to that masculinity that comes with being a male, the community perception and society perception that has gone back for many, many, many years. As that goes, they question who they are as a person, and that's a reoccurring theme that I see all the time.
We've always talked about that conscious and unconscious bias in women's health, so I'm very aware of that in women's health as a woman doctor, having worked in the gender equity space for a very long time. There's also unconscious bias towards men in the health profession. That expectation that they don't feel things the way we do, or that men are braver, or they're tougher. "He looks okay. He looks pretty happy. He's a strong bloke." But ask those questions, ask a couple more questions, and you might find that that person is actually brimming with tears under that facade. Men feel they have to wear a mask.
I learned about bias as a master's student, not as a nursing student, not through all my years of nursing, and I think there's an opportunity specifically for nurses around bias. The reasons why nurses may have… and what some of those biases may actually be.
Nurses are always learning. We have to. We have to always learn. And for nurses, recognizing what our biases are, and our strength and weaknesses, make us to be able to provide a much better-rounded service for our patients.
Take a look at these examples of how bias might look in practice.
These aren't dramatic failures. They're how gender assumptions operate in clinical practice: quick, plausible, often invisible. The risk is overlooking behaviours as 'the way men are' or that 'men are tough' when the reality is more complex and more clinically relevant.
Hear it from him
Dane's story
People didn't really realise how sick he was. He could not get out of bed. He was almost just in so much pain, and Mum and I literally had to carry him to the car.
The doctor was like, "You've got gastritis. Here's some medication. Go home, you'll be fine." And we were like, but what causes this? And he was like, "Oh, we see this in alcoholics, drug addicts and anorexics. You are clearly not a drug addict or an alcoholic, and you're not a teenage girl, so you're not going to have anorexia. And to be honest, I wish I was as fit as you were."
The energy would shift when Dane would come in the room. He had this really addictive charisma that you just knew was going to make you happy as well. He was the jokester, the prank star — but also the one you could have such an easy heart to heart with. Him and I were like a year apart. It was more of a partnership. He was a playful person.
And then he was admitted to hospital with a heart condition. My parents were like, well, okay, so what's the diagnosis? Oh, it's anorexia nervosa. Sorry — we just didn't realise. And we were like, but every other GP and health professional we've taken him to has said that it's not possible because he's a boy.
How do you turn around and say that five GPs are wrong?
Dane's story is a short excerpt from a documentary by filmmaker Jason Christou.
Twenty-five years ago, Jason lost himself to an eating disorder. When the arrival of his son forced him to confront ideas around his own body image, he resolved to reckon with his past so his son would not suffer the same fate. In the process, he found he was not alone. The documentary explores the experiences of male survivors, using raw interviews and animation drawn from Jason's art therapy journey.
To learn more about the documentary or to support the project, visit the website.
Think of a male patient whose presentation didn't match what you expected. What assumption had you made going in? What did the gap between that assumption and reality tell you?
What now?
You've reached the end of Part 1: Rebranding Masculinity.
You've explored how masculinities are formed, reinforced and carried across a man's life and how they show up in the consulting room, including your own.
In Part 2: Meet him where he's at, we introduce a practical, evidence-based framework for improving engagement with male patients.
Additional resources
Tick the resources you'd like to keep, then email them to yourself. Anything you saved with the bookmark button as you moved through the module is already ticked for you.
Tip: save resources as you go using the bookmark button inside each "MOUSTACHES LOVE RESEARCH" panel.
Your reflections
Review everything you wrote during the module, and email or print a copy to keep for your own records.
You have now completed this module. Click ‘Next’ in the bottom right hand corner to continue to the next module.
Changelog
Current version: v0.19
- New Acknowledgement of Country screen added after the FAQ (now screen 4); every later screen shifts by one.
- Accessibility & cleanup: subtle/label text darkened to meet WCAG AA contrast; captions and Tips headings track text-size and night mode (shared engine); removed unused packaged images.
- S7 “The opportunity is now” now plays the final expert-montage film with its transcript. The S9 screen is restored to Dr Zac Seidler’s course-intro video (the montage had been placed there by mistake in v0.16). S32 “Clash of the bricks” transcript finalised.
- S18 “It’s never just gender”: the four intersectionality points are now an expandable accordion (matching the GP course).
- Updated the S32 “1.6 Clash of the bricks” video to the final film and added its expert-montage transcript.
- “It’s never just gender” screen: reordered the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander paragraph to lead with culture as a source of strength and protective factor, then the health-outcomes context.
- Cultural responsiveness (accreditation): the “It’s never just gender” screen gained a sentence on culture as a protective factor for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, an “ask what matters to him” paragraph, and cultural-safety references (National ATSI Health Plan, Verbunt 2021, Macdonald 2022).
- Fixed the Brad knowledge check (S25): the three questions now step through correctly instead of sticking on "Choose an answer to continue".
- S24 (Brad's story) is now a dark-background video screen with the instruction sitting on the video; transcript stays readable on the dark screen.
- S33 "bias in practice" examples reworked into the clickable card design (matching the GP course); S10 "Ready?" is now title size on two lines.
- Merged the Dane's-story screens: video, a "Find out more" accordion, then "Pause for a mo" on one screen (module is now 35 screens).
- Wired S32's expert-montage video; swapped in new images on S11 (Brad), S21 and S26; nudged the S8 "2 in 5" text clear of the purple splash.
- S5 learning-outcome arrows render brand purple again — an
invert(1)filter was turning the lilac arrow olive-green (also affected night mode's fallback dot).
- List bullets are visible again — the arrow marker was missing on this module's list screens.
- Video on screen 7 now renders at its full width.
- Reduced motion is now a setting in the accessibility panel (turns down animations, moving backgrounds and transitions); the moustache/GIF and background videos honour it.
- A wrong quiz answer now always highlights the correct one in purple.
- Video and its transcript are always the same width, with the "Read transcript" button centred between them; transcripts no longer scroll in a small box.
- Practical-toolkit "moves" show a blinking arrow on the next one to open and a tick once opened; the "Copy" button was removed.
- Research panels are labelled "Moustaches love research" everywhere.
- New FAQ answer on certificates and CPD; removed the per-part durations.
- Accessibility: settings toggles and embedded videos now have proper names for screen readers; the reduced-motion control stays reachable when your device already forces reduced motion.
- Learning-outcomes and expressive copy now respond to the Text-size control.
- Images optimised for faster loading; brand fonts served as WOFF2.
- S8: rebuilt the 8-in-10 moustache infographic so only the eight black moustaches pulse; the two grey ones stay static.
- Onboarding & FAQ copy updates (consistent across all MiM Pro streams): reworded the Continue-button navigation hint; removed the trailing Oxford comma in the accessibility-settings hint; and revised the "Can I take a break?", "How long is this course?" and "Do I need anything to complete the course?" FAQ answers.
- Mixpanel tracking wired in: loads mixpanel_analytics.js, registers the stream/module-part/course super-properties, and names all five video screens for the reports. Tagged every FAQ and life-stage reveal with a
data-track-name; added link_clicked on research-paper links and reaction_clicked on "Save for later". No learner-facing change.
- Dane "Find out more" note: the documentary link now points to the real page (documentaryaustralia.com.au — "It's Not About the Food"), replacing the placeholder.
- LD feedback: new hero image; background transition video swapped to the nursing-themed clip; video transcript pills re-centred under every video (fixed a local
.video-controlsoverride that left-aligned them). - S5: the middle face of the portrait band is now Kenneth. S8: the "2 in 5" and "87%" stat boxes are now capped to the text width (were overhanging) and each pairs the figure with a portrait (Cooper beside "2 in 5"; portrait-1 beside "87%").
- Middle-aged masculinities: replaced the static "men delaying GP" chart image with the finalised animated SVG line chart from Claude Design — axes/line/points/value-labels animate in sequence and the purple plateau callout rises in, replaying each time the chart scrolls into view. Vector, so it scales crisply and no longer needs click-to-enlarge. Shared engine gains the reusable
[data-delay-chart]component.
- S8 ("The opportunity is now"): replaced the eight.png "10 men" graphic with the finalised moustache-8in10.png (eight filled / two faded moustache icons), and removed the photocopy texture from this slide's background so it sits on a flat background.
- First-draft build: Nursing Part 1 authored verbatim from the Men in Mind Primary Care Nurses storyboard v1.0 on the shared MiM engine.