Behind the Silence:
Uganda’s Growing Male Mental Health Crisis
Written by: Phionah Kemirembe
Saturday, September 5, 2026
On a cold morning in central Uganda, mourners gathered around a freshly dug grave as 32-year-old Ivan Maganda, a father of three, was laid to rest.
Neighbours remembered Maganda as a strong man who weathered difficult conditions, and worked hard despite difficult economic conditions. Among his church friends, he was a man who rarely complained.
But behind that image of strength was a struggle afew close to him openly acknowledged.
For months, Maganda had stopped sleeping. He withdrew from friends and repeatedly told relatives that he felt like a failure because he could no longer provide for his family the way society expected a man to.
Three days before his death, he reportedly asked a friend for money to travel to a health facility. He never made the journey.
His death became another tragedy carrying questions that are increasingly difficult to ignore: What happens when men are expected to endure emotional distress in silence? And when they finally seek help, is Uganda’s mental health system adequately prepared to receive them?
When strength becomes emptiness
At 25, Jimmy (not real name) remembers the period when he gradually stopped talking about what he was going through.
There was no single dramatic moment. Instead, years of small silences accumulated until the young man from Bweyogerere could no longer distinguish between being strong and feeling empty.
He was experiencing depression, although for a long time he did not have a name for what he was feeling.
Around him was a familiar expectation: men provide. Men endure. Men solve problems. Men “man up.”
Nobody had taught him that emotional pain also needed somewhere to go.
“I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I just knew I couldn’t feel anything anymore, and I couldn’t tell anyone that,” Jimmy says.
Today, he speaks from the other side of that experience, although he describes recovery as something he is still building one day at a time.
His story reflects a much wider concern.
World Health Organization estimates cited in Ugandan reporting indicate that men die by suicide at significantly higher rates than women. Uganda Police statistics recorded 218 suicide cases in 2024, up from 165 the previous year, an increase of about 32 percent.
Mental Health Uganda has similarly highlighted the disproportionate burden among men, even though women may report suicidal thoughts more frequently.
Behind those differences lies an important question about help-seeking: Are men suffering less, or are they simply speaking less?
A depression with no name
For Jimmy, depression emerged through pressures that initially appeared ordinary: unemployment, family expectations and the humiliation he felt when he could not provide in the way he believed a man was supposed to.
For young Ugandan men, these pressures can arrive during a particularly vulnerable stage of life.
Available reporting on Uganda’s suicide burden points to people aged 24 to 34 as a heavily affected group. These are also the years when society expects young adults to establish careers, support families, marry and demonstrate economic independence.
When those expectations collide with unemployment, financial insecurity and limited emotional support, the pressure can become overwhelming.
Jimmy eventually sought counselling.
He is now rebuilding relationships he had allowed to grow distant. He agreed to tell his story because he remembers how isolating depression felt, and how much it might have helped to hear that another man had experienced the same struggle and survived it.
Speaking, for him, has become part of recovery.
From Butabika and back
If Jimmy’s struggle unfolded largely in silence, Goobi Francis’s played out through alcohol.
Francis says he started drinking as a child. By adulthood, what had once offered an escape had become a dependency.
His journey eventually took him to Butabika National Referral Mental Hospital and through several rehabilitation centres before he achieved sustained sobriety.
His experience sits within another major public-health concern.
Uganda has recorded high levels of alcohol consumption, with men consuming substantially more alcohol than women. Research has also linked harmful alcohol use to mental-health challenges, family instability and other social and economic pressures.
At Butabika itself, hospital leadership told Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee in 2025 that alcohol and substance abuse accounted for roughly 30 percent of admissions.
For Francis, however, the statistics are secondary to the personal cost.
His journey involved relapse, shame, treatment and recovery.
“I had to tell my story to the world,” he says.
By speaking publicly about his addiction, Francis challenges another powerful stereotype: that addiction among men is simply indiscipline or moral failure rather than a health condition that may require professional treatment and sustained support.
“Be your brother’s keeper”
Jennifer, a mental health advocate with the Omagar Men’s Foundation, spends much of her time confronting the silence that shaped both Jimmy’s and Francis’s experiences.
Her organisation advocates for men’s welfare and mental wellbeing in a society where emotional suffering among men can easily remain invisible.
“Men go through a lot, even though they don’t express their emotions,” Jennifer says.
The expectations placed on men — resilience, independence and the ability to provide — can be positive qualities. But when strength is interpreted as never admitting pain, those same expectations can prevent someone from asking for help.
Jennifer believes intervention therefore cannot begin and end at hospitals.
“We should be our brother’s keeper, and be kind to them always,” she says.
It sounds like a simple appeal, but it speaks to one of the biggest obstacles confronting mental-health care: stigma.
If men fear that admitting distress will make them appear weak, conversations about mental health may begin only when a crisis has already escalated.
Community organisations are attempting to change that by creating spaces where men can talk before reaching breaking point.
But community support alone cannot substitute for a functioning public mental-health system.
When men seek help, is the system ready?
Dr. Ben Kibirige, a mental-health expert, sees the crisis at the intersection of two problems: social expectations that discourage men from expressing vulnerability and a health system that remains severely underfunded.
“Men have a lot of pressure on them and society’s expectations, and yet they have no one to talk to about all this,” he says.
His argument shifts responsibility beyond the individual.
Telling men to speak up is important. But when a man finally asks for professional help, counselling, psychiatric care or rehabilitation, government must ensure those services exist and are accessible.
That is where Uganda faces a significant accountability challenge.
Mental health receives less than one percent of Uganda’s health budget, according to a 2025/26 value-for-money audit by the Office of the Auditor General, despite reported mental, neurological and substance-use cases rising from about 468,000 in 2021 to nearly 595,000 in 2023.
At Butabika, the country’s national psychiatric referral hospital, the financial pressures are particularly stark.
The hospital’s executive director, Dr. Juliet Nakku, told Parliament in March 2025 that Butabika faced a funding shortfall estimated at Shs102 billion across wage, non-wage and capital development requirements.
The hospital received a wage budget of about Shs9.6 billion against an assessed requirement of Shs24 billion.
That funding gap has consequences for staffing and patient care.
Butabika has only 14 psychiatric specialists serving more than 1,000 patients, leaving professionals responsible for far more patients than recommended.
Outside the national referral hospital, access becomes even more difficult. Only a limited number of outpatient facilities are equipped to provide follow-up mental-health care, leaving many communities with inadequate access to sustained support.
The result is a troubling contradiction.
Ugandans are increasingly being encouraged to seek mental-health assistance, yet the public system they are being directed towards remains financially and institutionally constrained.
Beyond awareness to accountability
For years, much of the public conversation around men’s mental health has focused on encouraging men to talk.
Jimmy’s experience shows why that matters.
Francis’s recovery demonstrates why treatment matters.
Jennifer’s advocacy shows why communities must become safer places for men to express vulnerability.
But Dr. Kibirige’s argument raises the question that must come next: What happens after a man finally asks for help?
Awareness without accessible services can only go so far.
If mental-health cases are increasing while funding remains below one percent of the national health budget, then Uganda’s mental-health crisis is not only a story about stigma. It is also a story about public priorities, health financing, staffing and whether government investment is keeping pace with the scale of the problem.
The consequences of inadequate investment are ultimately experienced by individuals and families.
They are experienced by a young man in Bweyogerere struggling to understand why he feels empty.
By a man moving between rehabilitation centres trying to escape alcohol dependency.
And by families who may only understand the depth of a loved one’s distress when it is already too late.
Breaking the silence
There are reasons for hope.
Ugandan-led interventions, including community-based approaches and programmes that bring mental-health support closer to patients, suggest that treatment does not always have to begin inside a psychiatric hospital.
Such approaches can help identify depression earlier, expand access to counselling and reduce pressure on specialist facilities.
But sustainable change requires more than pilot projects.
It requires investment in mental-health professionals, stronger community services, accessible counselling and rehabilitation, and deliberate efforts to challenge the social expectations that teach boys and men to conceal emotional pain.
For Jimmy, recovery began with learning to say the word “depression” aloud.
For Francis, it meant standing before other people and acknowledging how close alcohol came to consuming his life.
Their stories challenge the idea that silence is strength.
Uganda’s response must now move beyond simply telling men to speak.
It must ensure that when they finally do, there is someone prepared to listen — and a health system adequately funded to help them recover.
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