Health department prevention specialist in Wyoming works to reduce rural stigma on seeking help for mental health

Johnson County in Wyoming (Google map)

On paper, Bill Hawley "is the 'prevention specialist' for the public health department in Johnson County, a plains-to-peaks frontier tract in Wyoming that is nearly the size of Connecticut but has a population of 8,600 residents. His official mandate is to connect people who struggle with alcohol and drug abuse, tobacco addiction, and suicidal impulses to the state’s limited social service programs. Part bureaucrat, part counselor, much of Bill’s life revolves around Zoom calls and subcommittees, government acronyms and grant applications," Jose Del Real reports for The Washington Post. "But his mission extends beyond the drab county building on Klondike Drive where he works. One Wyoming man at a time, he hopes to till soil for a new kind of American masculinity."

Hawley knows that men overall and rural men in particular face intense pressure to be stoic, that stigma of needing mental-health care often prevents them from seeking it. But men accounted for 79% of suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2020, and 70% were white men. Most of those suicides involved firearms, and often involved alcohol or drugs, Del Real reports. The phenomenon is particularly bad in Wyoming, which has the highest suicide rate per capita in the nation. 

Sociologists believe toxic masculinity may be to blame, and that rural stigma can make things even worse. Hawley, "who is 59 years old and White, is working out his own theory. It has to do with the gap between the expectations men have for their lives and the reality of their individual experiences, worsened by cultural norms that discourage them from expressing any emotions besides anger," Del Real reports. "Toxic masculinity often turns outward. But it also turns inward."