Adam Douglas has released a new single challenging society’s expectations for men’s mental health.
The track, Into My Life, is due for release on 8 January 2020 following previous releases Joyous We’ll Be and Change My Mind.
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The track exposes Adam Douglas‘ own vulnerability, rejecting society’s idealised vision of masculinity and the expectation that men should be strong, steady and must not cry. Instead he portrays the real struggle many men experience with their mental health and how a crisis often goes deeper than they admit.
To be a man in a midlife crisis is often underestimated as an identity search and a need to challenge one’s own boundaries, but what is all too often overlooked is the extent to which men’s own mental health can be stretched to breaking point. On his way out of his thirties, Adam Douglas is fast approaching midlife crisis territory himself and insists on drawing attention to the experiences that men can face but don’t always discuss. Douglas wrote Into My Life with fellow artist and friend Cory Chisel to encourage men struggling with pressures of aging to feel more comfortable to speak out about the anxiety and depression that ensue. “We have both become very aware of our own mental health,” he explains, “how it functions, how it doesn’t function, and how it can affect our lives and the lives of those around us. We’ve gone through a sort of middle aged mental health awakening.”
For both co-writers, Into My Life is about accepting darkness and depression, whilst feeling reassured in the fact that many other people are tackling similar feelings that can manifest at different points of their lives. Having grappled with his own hard times brought on by the pressures of expectations and being overworked, Douglas hopes that Into My Life will go some way in encouraging more men to work on opening up about their feelings and talking about their mental health.
He adds, “You have to fight your way through it and it’s fully possible to get back on your feet, even though it doesn’t feel like it when you’re in the middle of the tug of war with yourself. The most important thing is to have people around you who you can talk to, and that’s especially important for men who traditionally don’t talk about their feelings with others.”
The track comes ahead of Adam Douglas’ upcoming third studio album.
Adam Douglas – image courtesy Torgrim Halvari
