Moore says the group has also helped him shift his perspective on himself. “There’s this victimhood mentality where you carry [your pain] around on your shoulders and it weighs you down every single day,” he says. “But here, we can get that feeling off our chest and have a laugh at the things that have happened to us.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a report<\/a> analysing Belcher’s comedy-on-referral<\/a>\u00a0programme for men, co-author Lisa Sheldon, a consultant, clinical psychologist and a leader within the West London NHS Trust, also recognised this group dynamic. Among other benefits, she says, it involves “talking publicly about what it means to be human and being open about what goes on inside of us, whilst at the same time dispelling myths and establishing shared truths and connection”.<\/p>\n The report also says using humour as a therapeutic tool, rather than framing the course as therapy, helped to “facilitate a lighter perspective on past traumas, thus lessening the burden of anxiety and fear”.<\/p>\n Belcher agrees that the lighter framework was key. “If I’d asked these men, ‘Do you want to come to a therapeutic men’s school?’ they wouldn’t do that, but when we said, ‘Come and learn stand-up comedy,’ that worked,” Belcher says.<\/p>\n The rise of comedy on ‘prescription’<\/p>\n The need for therapeutic tools has grown more urgent in England, where rates of mental illness have continued to rise. The most recent data finds one in six people over 16 in England <\/a>experienced symptoms of a mental health problem in the past week. The Office of National Statistics found the rate of suicide rose to more than 6,000 deaths in 2023<\/a> in England and Wales\u00a0\u2013 the highest since 1999, with rates among men<\/a> particularly high.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moore says the group has also helped him shift his perspective on himself. “There’s this victimhood mentality where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-191779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}