It sounds like something one man confesses, but it’s actually a language many quietly share. It lives in the pauses during car rides, in the way living rooms echo with cricket commentary instead of emotions, in conversations where the warmest version of “How are you?” is “Office kaisa tha?” followed by “Theek hi tha.”
Hamza is twenty-eight. He works in an office where an Employee Wellness poster hangs on a wall no one looks at. He hasn’t had a real conversation with his father in years. Not a fight — at least a fight would be something. Just an empty space between “Assalamualaikum” and “Wi-Fi ka password kya hai?”
Strangely, outside home, Hamza can name things. He watches reels on burnout. He knows the difference between stress and anxiety. He jokes about being “mentally finished,” and his friends laugh — the kind of laughter men use to avoid changing anything.
If silence were harmless, the numbers would tell a different story.
WHO estimates show around 727,000 deaths by suicide in 2021, with men dying nearly twice as often as women. In Pakistan, a 2024 Dawn report citing WHO data placed our suicide mortality rate at 9.8 per 100,000, up from 7.3 just four years earlier. Tharparkar remains a tragic hotspot, with poverty, debt, and untreated mental distress tightening their grip year after year.
The space between “I’m fine” and “I need help” is where many fathers and sons quietly disappear.
➡️ If you’re somewhere in that silence, reach out to Tele-Tabeeb 1123. It’s free, confidential, and could be the first step back into clarity.
No one tells you this: your father probably never grew up in a world where emotions were allowed to form full sentences. His generation learned survival through endurance — load-shedding, job insecurity, political turmoil, real violence — with emotions stuffed into a mental cupboard no one dared to open.
So when Hamza tries, just once, to say, “Abba, sometimes I feel really low,” his father gives a small, flickering reaction — like a bulb shaking during voltage fluctuation. Then the TV volume increases. Breaking news fills the room. Somewhere inside, a voice whispers: Dangerous territory. Go back to safe topics — bills, blood pressure, PSL.
We call this coldness.Sometimes, it’s fear.
For many men of that era, naming a feeling feels riskier than ignoring chest pain. If they admit to loneliness or exhaustion, what happens to the identity they’ve spent forty years holding up?
This is the tension no mental health campaign poster ever fully captures.
Hamza often feels as if his father has ready-made answers for everything. When he talks about changing careers, it’s dismissed as “fazool ideas.” When he mentions therapy, he hears, “Hum ne bhi zindagi guzari hai, koi therapist nahi tha.” And when he sets boundaries or expresses a different worldview, his father concludes that “Tum log bohot naazuk ho.”
For Hamza, all of this lands heavily. It feels like his father doesn’t take him seriously, as if he only wants a younger, obedient version of himself rather than a son with his own identity.
On the other end of the same conversation, the father is carrying his own quiet heartbreak. He grew up in a home where his father’s word was final, yet now he watches his son push back, challenge his views, or withdraw entirely. Jokes that once felt harmless are now labelled “insensitive,” and genuine concerns are dismissed as “controlling” or “toxic.” To him, it feels like nothing he says is ever right anymore.
And so, both of them retreat.The son pulls back to avoid being judged.The father pulls back to avoid feeling rejected.
Between them, the space grows heavier, filled with misunderstandings that neither knows how to name. Mental health doesn’t deteriorate through dramatic blowups; it wears down quietly, in these small, daily misreadings that slowly harden into distance.
At night, Hamza will text a friend: “Vent?”He may even open up to strangers online.But the ten steps from his bedroom to his father’s door feel harder than crossing a highway.
Two men in the same home, both pretending they don’t worry about each other.
The women see it first — the mother noticing her husband’s shorter temper, her son’s sharper jokes. A sister recognizing exhaustion disguised as laziness. They watch two people orbiting the same emotional space without ever landing.
November arrives with its campaigns and posters reminding everyone that “It’s okay not to be okay.” But inside the home, the unspoken rules feel older and heavier, shaped by years of habits, fears, and untold stories.
Real change almost never enters dramatically; it begins in small, almost invisible ways. Sometimes it starts with Hamza quietly refilling his father’s chai and gently acknowledging his fatigue, offering a simple, “Aap bhi bohot thak gaye honge, na?” Other times, it surfaces much later, when a father finally allows himself to admit, in a low, unsteady voice, that “Kabhi kabhi dimagh bohot bhar jata hai.”
These moments are not threats to authority or signs of disrespect. They’re early warning signals — tiny cracks in rigid silence that function exactly like the first symptoms of chest pain. They are reminders that something inside needs attention before it turns into an emergency.
If the silence in your home feels heavy, Tele-Tabeeb 1123 can be the call that shifts the direction, offering support before the weight becomes too much to carry alone.
At SIEHS, we witness every day how quickly an ordinary moment can turn into a crisis — not just on roads or in public spaces, but also within the quiet corners of a household. Men’s Mental Health Month isn’t about turning fathers and sons into poets; it’s about creating room for one honest sentence, one small act of courage, before something deeper and more painful breaks.
If something in this story tugged at you — whether you’re a son feeling unheard, a father feeling misunderstood, or someone caught between the two — you don’t need to untangle it alone.
Free therapy.Free counselling.Real help.
➡️ Reach out to Tele-Tabeeb 1123 today. One conversation can change the entire emotional climate of a home.
Seeking help isn’t a failure of masculinity.It’s a way of protecting your mind — and the people you love.
