Men's Health Week 2025: RIP, Brian Wilson and Men's Mental Health Issues, Drug and Alcohol Use/Abuse
As with death overall, there is a large sex gap here
RIP, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys:
11 June 2025, People: Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys Co-Founder and Singer, Dies at 82
Brian Wilson, the pop music genius and singer who co-founded the Beach Boys, has died. He was 82.
The musician's family announced his death on Wednesday, June 11 in an Instagram post featuring a recent photo of the star smiling on a bench.
"We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away," the statement read. "We are at a loss for words right now. Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world. Love & Mercy."
Let me drop in a peaceful instrumental video before we get into the heavy stuff:
The Heavy Stuff: Child Abuse into Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Back into the People article:
Despite the Beach Boys' soaring popularity and continued success on the charts, Wilson started to succumb to various mental instabilities brought on by depression over deafness in his right ear, an unofficial musical rivalry with the Beatles, the relentless nature of being on tour and what PEOPLE described later, in 1975, as "the excesses of the '60s," Wilson became a "victim of his own genius." Years later, after continued mental decline and increased self-destructive behavior, he went into reclusion after his father's death in June 1973.
In 1991, Wilson told PEOPLE his father's abuse and a "two-by-four [he hit him with] caused deafness in my right ear,'' adding that his ''childhood and adolescence were very sad times in my life, because I always had to turn my head to hear things, trying to imagine where those voices were coming from.''
With the help of psychologist Eugene Landy, Wilson eventually made a brief comeback in 1976, helping produce the album, The Beach Boys Love You, before falling back into another years-long depression fueled by drugs and alcohol.
Men’s Health Week is not only about the obvious physical health issues, but also mental health.
The People article is fairly long (given Wilson’s health issues, most of it was written long ago) and gets into some of the issues, but also there have been some documentaries on Wilson and The Beach Boys: Where To Watch ‘Love & Mercy,’ ‘The Beach Boys’ Documentary, And More.
I will not dip deeper into Wilson’s specifics, because I want to talk about the broader trends in the U.S., specifically among men. Being what I am, I focus on the end result of death due to drug overdoses, or alcohol-related deaths.
Drug Overdoses: A Hideous Scourge That Has Gotten Worse.. With Recent Respite
I’ve written several times about how awful drug overdose deaths have jumped up during the pandemic, and how much overdose deaths grew even before the pandemic.
But to really drive it home: a lot of this was among men:
I updated my older graph with the 2023 and 2024 data.
The 2023 data are finalized, and showed some decrease compared to 2022. The 2024 data are definitely going to show a large decrease, but whether it gets us all the way back to pre-pandemic levels or just a bit above remains to be seen.
Let’s compare the sex gap in Drug Overdose deaths versus all cause mortality:
These ratios are using age-adjusted death rates for each year — the gap in drug ODs minimized in 2010, as females were catching up to males. But men were still dying at about twice the rate.
Since the pandemic, male rates were the ones that shot up extremely fast, more than for females.
Drug Overdose Death Rates for Men, Broken Out By Age Groups
I selected the main age groups where one sees drug overdose deaths for males.
I stuck in the age 65-74 year group so you could see the clear breakout — the peak “dying” years are young adulthood/young middle-age.
I have been calling it the Millennial Massacre.
The brunt of this has fallen upon men, as you can see above.
It does seem that the rates may be falling back to pre-pandemic levels… but that’s still high!
That’s still not good!
Alcohol-related Deaths
It’s not just deaths due to drug overdoses that have been on the rise. All sorts of alcohol-related deaths have been on the rise, and some of these are more difficult to capture in my stats.
I have done some posts on these through the pandemic:
Neither of these had a sex-related angle. It’s more difficult to get at alcohol-related death info (I have to use contributing cause of death, and do some other analyses, yadda yadda.)
Rather than make a new graph, here is a paper:
Trends in Alcohol-Related Deaths by Sex in the US, 1999-2020
Results: A total of 605 948 alcohol-attributed deaths were identified in the US from 1999 through 2020 (AAMR, 8.3 per 100 000 persons; 95% CI, 8.3-8.3 per 100 000 persons). The mortality burden was higher among male individuals than female individuals, with male individuals being 2.88 (95% CI, 2.86-2.89) times more likely to die compared with female individuals. However, temporal trends showed an increase in alcohol-related deaths for both male and female individuals in recent years, with higher rates of increase among female individuals relative to male individuals. The AAMR increased by 12.5% (95% CI, 6.4%-19.1%) per year among male individuals from 2018 to 2020 but increased by 14.7% (95% CI, 9.1%-20.5%) per year among female individuals during the same period. Trend differences were observed across subtypes of age, race and ethnicity, cause, and region.
I added the emphasis — the mortality ratio is even higher for alcohol-related deaths than for drug-ODs.
Movember Campaign: Men’s Mental Health
For both Drug-related and Alcohol-related deaths, mental health issues can often be involved. The Movember Foundation has a campaign around Men’s Mental Health to address this.
One of their sites is just to get the guys talking w/ each other with “ALEC”:
A: ASK — “What’s up?” Start by asking how he’s feeling. It’s worth mentioning any changes you’ve picked up on. Maybe he’s spending more time at the bar, has gone quiet in the group chat, or isn’t turning up to social events. Whatever it is, he’s just not himself.
L: Listen — Give him your full attention. Let him know you’re hearing what he’s saying and you’re not judging. You don’t have to diagnose problems or offer solutions, but asking questions lets him know you’re listening.
E: Encourage Action — Help him focus on simple things that might improve how he feels. Is he getting enough sleep? Is he exercising and eating well? Maybe there’s something that’s helped him in the past – it’s worth asking.
C: Check In — Suggest you catch up soon – in person if you can. If you can’t manage a meet-up, make time for a call, or drop him a message. This helps to show that you care; plus, you’ll get a feel for whether he’s feeling any better.
It sounds reasonable, and isn’t just “encourage the guy to go to therapy” — because that’s often not helpful advice anyway. (Where to find a therapist? How to pay for it?, etc.)
The above sounds like a good way to make connections and be engaged, and, as the kids say, it isn’t cringe.
Some of the problems, of course, are beyond just lifting some weights or talking with a fellow bro, but if we look at what happened in the pandemic, when gyms were closed and people couldn’t hang out with their bros, it seems there may have been something there.
Let’s Hang Out With The Boys (and the Girls)
I can’t end on that.
So let’s end with this.
