There is a particular silence that Muslim men carry: of someone who has decided (somewhere between his upbringing and the present) that what he is feeling is not the kind of thing a man says aloud, that the heaviness on his chest in the early hours, the way hope has become something he can no longer locate, the thought that keeps surfacing about whether everyone around him would simply be better off — that these are things to be managed privately, if at all. To bring them into a room, to name them to another person, would be shameful. It would mean breaking something.
Ahmed Tomal is an accredited counsellor and psychotherapist who has worked with Muslim men for years, in private practice at Tawfiq Therapy, in the NHS, and as one of the subject matter experts (SMEs) behind the architecture of Hold On. He is precise, warm, and completely without illusion about what he sees in the men who eventually come through his door.
Men die from suicide three times more than women. At the same time, men seek help for mental health far less than women. That is a major problem.”
Your emotions were made by Allah, they’re trying to tell you something
Ahmed starts somewhere that is easy to misread as obvious but is quite radical in the context of how most Muslim men were raised.
As he says, emotions are functional. Allah (subḥānahu wa ta’āla) created human beings with the capacity to feel anxiety, fear, anger, and grief as instruments of information. They have utility.
- Anxiety is telling you something important is coming that requires your attention.
- Fear is telling you something is immediately dangerous and you need to protect yourself.
- Anger is telling you that a boundary has been crossed and something needs to change.
These aren’t signs of weakness. They’re the machinery of a functioning human being. So the problem isn’t the emotion. The problem is what happens when the emotion has nowhere to go.
He describes it like this: when a person grows up in an environment where emotions are not given space (where distress is not named, where vulnerability is treated as something to overcome rather than acknowledge), the child learns to cope without the tools the emotion was supposed to provide.
They bottle it. They suppress it. They develop what he calls maladaptive coping mechanisms: withdrawal, isolation, porn addiction, substance use, the inward turning of anger until it becomes depression. Outwardly, they function. Inwardly, they are running a system that is failing.
Eventually that can lead to suicide, because that is one of the major causes. Depression, major depression, is one of the highest risk factors.”
What anxiety is, and a Qur’ānic example nobody mentions
The most evidence-based approach to anxiety disorders, he explains, is something called exposure response prevention. You do not run from the thing that frightens you. You expose yourself to it, slowly, incrementally, in manageable doses, and you allow your body and mind to habituate. It is to learn that the feared thing is not as dangerous as it seemed. That you can tolerate it. That you can cope.
See, anxiety does two things simultaneously: it overestimates the danger, and it underestimates your capacity to cope with it. It tells you the thing will definitely happen and you will definitely not be able to handle it. Neither of these are usually true. But you do not discover that by avoiding the situation. You discover it by staying.
Then he offers an example from Surat Tāhā. Mūsā (ʿalayhi al-Salām) throws his staff and it becomes a snake. He runs, and Allah (subḥānahu wa ta’āla) calls him back. He returns, and then (this is the part that is almost never mentioned) Allah tells him to pick up the snake. Which is still a snake. Not yet a staff. He has to hold the snake until it turns back.
He has to expose himself to that which he is scared of. He has to hold that snake until it turns back into a stick, and that, in essence, is what we call exposure response prevention.”
And it is not a one-time experience. When Mūsā (ʿalayhi al-Salām) stands before Pharaoh and the magicians conjure serpents, Allah strengthens him with signs again. Because the training had to be repeated. Because exposure is not a single event, it is a practice. Allah was training him, subhānAllah.
The solution to anxiety, from both clinical and Qur’ānic perspectives, is the same: tawakkul (trust). Not a passive resignation, but an active, practised, earned trust, built through continuing to move toward what frightens you, in reliance on the One who holds the outcome.
The man who bottles it, and the man who punches the wall
He gives an example that will be recognisable to almost every man.
Abdullah comes home from a hard day’s work. His wife is at the end of her own hard day with the children. She snaps at him, takes the remote, turns off the TV. He says nothing. He goes upstairs, gives the kids a bath. That night he sleeps on the far side of the bed. At some point, months or years later, he divorces her. He could not take it any more.
Anwar comes home to the same scenario. He explodes. He screams in her face. He punches the wall. He storms out. He comes back at 11pm and gets into bed as if nothing happened.
Most people, looking at these two men, would say Anwar has an anger problem. Ahmed says they both do.
- Abdullah learned at some point, perhaps very early, that expressing his feelings leads to shutdown, rejection, or worse. So he bottles it up. And he bottles it up. And he bottles it up. And the bottle eventually breaks, not in a wall punch, but in a marriage that ends.
- Anwar learned that aggression gets his needs met, temporarily. That is, until no one wants to be around him any more and he cannot understand why his relationships keep failing.
Both men are suffering from the same root problem: they never learned what to do with what they feel. They never had the language, or the space, or the model, to do anything other than suppress or explode.
The middle path, the Islamic path, runs between the two. It sounds like this:
I know what I’m feeling. I know what the situation is doing to me. I can name it. I can express it in a way that opens conversation rather than closing it.”
That is not softness. That is the highest form of self-awareness. And it is the thing most Muslim men were never taught.
What depression is and what your family can do
Depression is not the same as sadness, and it is not the same as a chemical imbalance requiring medication. It exists on a spectrum, and major depression — the kind that distorts reality, that makes a person see their entire life through a filter of hopelessness — is something that requires a specific, careful response.
If you are watching someone you love moving into that territory, here is what he says to do, and what not to do. The instinct, especially for parents, for brothers, for fathers, is to “fix” it. To offer solutions. To explain why things are not as bad as they seem. This instinct, however well-intentioned, is usually the wrong move.
What the person needs first is not a solution. They need a space.
Hold space. You don’t have to fix the problem. Just acknowledge and let them acknowledge the problem itself. No judgment, no negative reactions, just be there with them.”
This means: be in the room, be in the conversation. Not on your phone while you ask how they are. Not constructing your response while they are still speaking. Actually there. And when they cannot find words, being comfortable with the silence that comes before words.
You are not there to solve it. You are there to make it safe for them to say it aloud. And safety, unconsciously, physiologically, is what allows a person to come out from behind the barrier they have built. You cannot demand that barrier come down. You can only create the conditions that make it safe to lower it.
If you try and they do not respond, try again. Not pressuring. Not making it about your worry. Just: I’m here, whenever you’re ready. And I’m not going anywhere.
The signs that should stop you in your tracks
Ahmed names three specific things to listen for. If you hear any of these from someone you love, a son, a brother, a husband, a friend, stop everything.
- The sense that they are a burden. “They’d be better off without me. I’m just making everything harder for everyone.”
- Hopelessness. “Things aren’t going to get better. Nothing’s going to change. I just can’t see a way through.”
- A desire to disappear. “I just want it to stop. I just want to not be here.”
These aren’t things to acknowledge and move on from. These are warning signs of suicidal ideation. And when you hear them, do not avoid them out of fear. Do not worry that asking directly will plant the idea. The research is unambiguous on this: asking directly does not increase the risk of suicide. It almost always decreases it, because for the first time the person is being seen.
Be direct. Be compassionate. Say: “Are you thinking about taking your life? Is that what you mean?” And if they say yes, do not panic. Do not close down. Stay. Ask what is happening for them. Find out whether they have a plan. Help them put distance between themselves and whatever means they might be thinking of.
When it comes to major depression, it can distort reality in your mind. They are seeing their life in a completely different way, simply because they’re in this state. Your job is not to fix that in the conversation. Your job is to hold them.”
The shame that is killing Muslim men
Men die from suicide three times more often than women. Men seek mental health support far less than women. These two facts together describe a crisis that is hiding in plain sight in every masjid, every WhatsApp group, every extended family in Britain. Ahmed names what is driving it as shame.
The construct, cultural, not Islamic, that says real men do not talk about this, that vulnerability is weakness, that if you crack, if you admit to another man that you are not okay, something is lost that cannot be recovered.
He is direct about how wrong this is.
The Sahāba had vulnerabilities. They expressed them. They cried for the right reasons. They had a relationship with each other, real brotherhood, not performed brotherhood, in which these things could be named. The Prophet ﷺ buried his son and wept, and when the Sahāba looked at him with something like surprise, he said: “The heart feels pain, the eyes shed tears, but the tongue will not utter what displeases Allah.” The emotion was not the problem. The emotion was human. What was guarded was the tongue. [1]
When Khadījah (radiy Allahu ‘anha) died, years later the Prophet ﷺ welled up at the sound of her sister’s voice. When he lost those he loved, he grieved. When he faced what felt like divine silence during the period before Surat al-Duhā, the experience was real and the response from Allah was specific and tender.
None of this is weakness. All of it is being human.
The only way to deal with it is to talk to a brother that loves you for the sake of Allah. And that is missing in our community.”
What brotherhood should look like
It is an un-masculine trait never to praise men, never to elevate other men. I try to do that all the time, I try to make someone feel very comfortable. You’re handsome, you’re strong, you’re intelligent. It helps me as well, because Shaytān doesn’t get in the way between me and my brother.”
Then he describes what love is:
Love is being intentional and directional, wanting the optimal goodness and guidance for that person. That’s love. And we love for the sake of Allah … I’m intentional and directional to you, that I want you to be the most optimal version of who you are.”
This is what the community that can save a man’s life looks like. The brotherhood that can hold a man when he is failing, and neither shame him for failing nor pretend the failure is not real. There is no need for the brotherhood that gathers only when things are fine and disperses when things are not. And there’s no benefit in the circle where vulnerability is met with a shrug and a platitude.
If you do not know how to do that, if you do not have the words, training, or the emotional bandwidth in that moment, Ahmed offers something that is extraordinarily simple and almost always enough to start:
Just being honest. Saying: I actually don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to handle it. But I want to be with you. That honesty is profoundly powerful. It’s a real connection built in that moment.”
For the man this article is for…
If you have read this far, it is possible, probable, that some of the above is not abstract.
Maybe you recognise the bottling. The silence that has grown at home. The way the hope you used to have has become something harder to locate. The thought that circles and does not leave, the one that says “They would all be better off”. The shame that has kept you from saying any of this to anyone.
Those thoughts are not telling you the truth. Major depression, when it gets to that depth, distorts reality. It tells you the situation is permanent when it is not. It tells you you are a burden when you are not. It tells you no one would understand when there are people whose entire professional life is shaped around understanding exactly this.
The research on suicide is unambiguous about one thing: people who survive a suicidal crisis do not regret surviving. They are glad. The moment passes. What felt like a permanent state was a state, not a verdict.
Just hold on. This moment will pass. No moment stays the same, and this moment will also go.”
You do not need to be in a clinical crisis to deserve support. You do not need to have a plan. You do not need to have failed some threshold of suffering before you are allowed to say something is wrong.
You just need to say it to someone. Anyone. A brother, a counsellor, a helpline, a stranger on the other end of a phone who will hold the space for the next few minutes.
That is all. Just that.
Source: Hold On / Islam21c
Notes
[1] Sahīh al-Bukhari, 1,303; https://sunnah.com/bukhari:1303