Disaster recovery work temporarily boosted short-term physical and mental benefits for men

New Northwestern University research aims to shed light on what drives inequalities among men in the aftermath of megadisasters. In such situations, men are often depicted as heroic leaders, and this study finds that many of them experience improved mental and physical health while assisting with recovery efforts. However, for some men, the boost is short-lived once recovery activities are completed, leading to emotional lows and potentially increasing the risk of suicide.

Rebecca Ewert, an assistant professor of instruction in sociology at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and author of the study published in Gender & Society, grew up in Shasta County, California. After the county was devastated by the Carr wildfire in 2018, she spent six months conducting in-depth interviews with survivors and disaster relief workers about their experiences, hoping to isolate factors contributing to the risk of suicide.

Prior to the fire, risk of suicide among men in the county had been about twice the state average, with men accounting for approximately 80% of suicides. After the fire, Ewert said she found men were doing better than expected. “After a disaster of this magnitude, you’d reasonably expect survivors to feel anger and depression, but my interviews revealed some men experienced a boost in their mental health.”

Ewert found that relief efforts following the Carr fire in Shasta County gave local men an opportunity to show publicly how they care for their families—protecting property, securing housing and clearing debris—which gave some of them a sense of purpose and helped them feel connected to others.

Ewert calls the phenomenon of finding heightened purpose and belonging in an intense and time-bound situation “provisional masculine resources.” The intense and temporary characteristics of disasters are key to accessing these opportunities. As recovery activities wrapped up, men said those feelings of well-being diminished.

Focusing on inequalities among men, Ewert’s interviews showed survivor responses varied dramatically depending on age. Disaster response activities provided primarily younger and retired men with noticeable improvements in purpose and vitality, while middle-aged men with families and careers did not notice such a boost. And, as recovery activities wrapped up, the boost declined for elderly men (those at highest risk for suicide), leaving them worse off in the long run.

Ewert says these men were worse off in the long term because the stories shared by community members and documented by news outlets around the time of the fire reinforced narrowly defined gender roles that disadvantage both men and women. As the fire recovery period ended, elderly men lost those opportunities to act manly and had many new, memorable stories reminding them of the capacity they have now again lost. Ewert said this temporary character of “provisional masculine resources” is what makes them so influential on men’s health.

“Provisional masculine resources allow some men opportunities to reap gendered rewards while excluding others,” Ewert said. “It also gives legitimacy to survivor and recovery stories containing lessons about gender, which last long after the smoke clears. The overall effect is to justify and retrench an unequal gender regime characterized by inequalities, not only between men and women, but also among men and among women.”

Takeaways for the public

Ewert said although the study looks at a rural county and is focused on disaster, the findings can be applied more broadly.

“We hear discussions about the rise in loneliness, and the young men participating in the manosphere and looksmaxxing, which are ways of performing masculinity for other men,” Ewert said. “There is a need to look at when the rewards of masculinity are powerful but short-lived. It’s not accurate to say all men have power and all women don’t.

“The stories we tell about disaster recovery, something seemingly unrelated to gender, in fact play an important role in teaching men and women how they are supposed to behave in relation to one another, stories that reinforce powerful inequalities for people of all genders,” Ewert said.

While many studies have explored social inequalities between men and women, the Northwestern study is unique in its focus on inequalities among men. Ewert says that there is potential in studying bounded periods of heightened purpose and belonging. Ewert suggests future research focus on men as they navigate transitions between these periods (such as graduating from college, leaving the military) and on groups of men who get high rewards in a short period, such as school athletes, military personnel, politicians or influencers of culture.

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Lisa Lock

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Andrew Zinin

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