About this site (and me)

There's no shortage of mental health content on the internet. Most of it is either so clinical that it reads like a textbook, or so relentlessly upbeat that it makes you want to lie down in a darkened room. This site aims to be neither.

My name is Jerry Kennard. I spent most of my career as a psychologist working first in health service settings and then in Higher Education, and I've spent more years than I care to count thinking about how people's minds work — particularly men's minds, and particularly what happens when life starts throwing the bigger, harder stuff at you.

Here's what I noticed over that career: men in their 40s, 50s, and beyond are often navigating some of the most significant psychological terrain of their lives — identity, purpose, health, relationships, loss — and doing so largely in silence. Not because they're incapable of reflection, but because most of what's out there wasn't really written with them in mind.

This site is for men who are willing to think seriously about how they're doing — without the jargon, without the hand-wringing, and without being made to feel like a problem to be solved.

The topics covered here span mental health, relationships, work, retirement, physical wellbeing and the various transitions that tend to ambush you just when you thought you had things figured out. The tone is informed, honest and occasionally a bit funny, because if you've lived long enough, you know that life frequently is.

I'm not here to tell you what to think, how to feel or how to behave. But if you find that something on this site helps you think a little differently, or feel a little less alone with something you've been carrying, then it's done its job.

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