The concept is almost embarrassingly straightforward. Give a group of elderly men a room, some tools, a kettle, and an excuse to come in on Tuesday mornings, and observe the impact on their mental well-being. Not a therapist. No form for intake. Sawdust and a conversation that doesn’t feel like a conversation. This week at ShedFest West in Edmonton, new national research from Canada revealed that this low-tech formula is actually reaching men who would otherwise be sitting alone, something that decades of wellness campaigns have failed to do.
It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. Before joining Men’s Shed, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed reported feeling lonely or socially isolated. After joining, that picture drastically changes: 58.1 percent report improved mental wellbeing, 74.3 percent report a strong sense of belonging, and nearly half report receiving informal mental health support or advice simply by being in the Shed, frequently without realizing it was happening. The research’s principal investigator, Dr. Raza Mirza, refers to this as “health by stealth,” and the term sticks. Men aren’t coming in to ask for assistance. They are entering to construct, repair, or weld something. The assistance comes in a sideways manner.
It is worthwhile to consider why that is important. In general, older men are notoriously poor at asking for help directly. They are not fond of support groups. Anything that smells like therapy tends to be avoided by them. You’ll probably get silence or, worse, an empty room the following week if you ask a group of retired tradesmen to gather in a circle and talk about their emotions. However, when a router or lathe is placed in front of them, men who haven’t talked about their own diagnoses or their wives’ deaths in years suddenly start talking, almost as a result of using their hands. Observing this pattern across nations gives the impression that the format is the intervention in and of itself.
In Australia, Men’s Sheds emerged in the 1990s as a result of the realization that retirement was depleting men more quickly than anyone had anticipated. With over 200 autonomous sheds and a goal to reach 1,000 by 2032, Canada is reportedly the fastest-growing shed movement in the world. It first spread to Ireland, then the UK. The model has been incorporated into national health strategies in both Australia and Ireland. A national men’s health strategy is anticipated later this year, and Canada’s health minister has indicated that the country is moving in the same direction.
In contrast, there are a few Sheds and a session at a conference on lifestyle medicine in the United States. That’s about it. There is a Men’s Sheds organization in the United States that is genuinely working, but it lacks the funding sources, public visibility, and policy support that its international counterparts have. Given that the U.S. Surgeon General published a comprehensive advisory on loneliness in 2023, calling it a public health emergency comparable to smoking, it’s difficult to ignore this discrepancy. The alert arrived. Most of the time, the infrastructure needed to react to it didn’t, at least for this specific population.
The lack of a single coordinating body may be the cause. Perhaps “shed” sounds too modest and unglamorous for American health policy, which favors dashboard-equipped apps and pilot programs. It’s an odd gap, whatever the cause. The American response to the growing body of research, which dates back to a 2013 academic review that identified Men’s Sheds as a promising model more than ten years ago, has been scant.
With every new study, it becomes more evident that the issue of loneliness among men is no longer a mystery. It is not insurmountable. It may simply be out of style because the solution doesn’t appear to be medical. It appears to be a workshop. How well the model would work in America’s more dispersed, less centrally funded community health system is still up for debate. However, the evidence from Canada this week makes it much more difficult to defend the cost of not trying.
