In January 2002, I gave a lecture on trauma and depression to 40 New York firefighters who had survived 9/11. I was there as part of a program I co-developed with the FDNY to help New York’s bravest navigate the emotional aftermath of losing 343 firefighters — many of them close friends, some of them relatives.
Like embers at ground zero, firehouses around New York were still smoldering in emotional turmoil. My firehouse had lost seven men, and those not working 24-hour shifts were often on “the pile,” still searching for their missing brothers’ bodies. Most were suffering trauma, depression and survivor guilt, which they often expressed as destructive conflict. Some were drinking too much.
The plan was to embed a psychologist in every firehouse that had lost men and see if they would accept a psychologist to help them.
The plan was to embed a psychologist in every firehouse that had lost men and see if they would accept a psychologist to help them work through their feelings. So how did I do?
“You sucked.”
That’s what the captain leading that combined engine-and-ladder company told me. A lieutenant then gave me a cup of coffee and politely nudged me to leave. At that point, I had 15 years of experience working with boys and men, plus trauma training from Israel. I knew these firefighters would need help, but I worried the codes of harsh masculinity would keep them from seeking it.
I took a different tack when I returned a few days later. I asked the men to teach me the apparatuses, the roles, the strategies of firefighting. I ate lunch with them, responded to emergency calls with them, let them see me as just a man — with my own strengths and weaknesses — rather than as a psychologist. I shared my own trauma stories, including the trauma related to my time as a teenager volunteering on a kibbutz near Israel’s northern border during the Yom Kippur War.
I made the firehouse itself my primary “patient” and worked to restore the attachment and support systems built into that community. I triaged the most affected and got them into treatment. Then I brought the men together in groups to grieve, heal and decide how to memorialize the dead. Over time I became an emotional container for their trauma, stress and guilt — sometimes met with resistance and anger, other times, in stairwells and parked cars, with someone quietly sharing a nightmare, or grief, or guilt for the fallen. Gradually, they let go of the “hands of the dead,” integrated their losses and — changed forever — returned to their lives. The pilot was deemed successful enough, and psychologists were assigned to the many firehouses that lost men around the city.
Today we face another mental health crisis, one affecting millions of boys and men. Research from the think tank Equimundo finds that 40% of men show depressive symptoms, 44% of young men had suicidal thoughts in the prior two weeks, and 65% of men age 18 to 23 say no one really knows them and they have little optimism for the future.
After initial resistance, firehouse clinicians found the men eager to talk — as long as they felt the clinician was authentic, trustworthy, patient. Reframing grieving and healing as its own kind of heroism also helped.
Boys and men often experience early emotional neglect and high rates of exposure to violence and trauma. Sept. 11 was a singular event, but recurring boyhood traumas are just as corrosive.
Much depends on how we approach these men. After initial resistance, firehouse clinicians found the men eager to talk — as long as they felt the clinician was authentic, trustworthy, patient. Reframing grieving and healing as its own kind of heroism also helped.
We need more spaces where boys and men can build real emotional attachments that ease loneliness and isolation. Firefighters already have this: a facsimile family offering mentorship, purpose and rituals of memory. Too many young men today lack any equivalent. They’re caught instead in a “bowling alone” digital economy, without what philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich called “objects of devotion,” people and places to belong to.
Firefighters also have a purpose recognized as heroic. To help men today, we need a broader definition of masculinity — not one that requires anyone to run into burning buildings. We need a definition that values the everyday heroism of lifting others up rather than dominating through wealth and power. Voluntarism, meaningful work, apprenticeships and mandatory national service could all offer boys and young men that same challenge, purpose and attachment.
And wherever boys and men already gather — schools, places of worship, barbershops, gyms, sports leagues — we need to embed mental health support directly. As we learned in New York’s firehouses, this kind of intervention bypasses stigma because it’s already part of the systems people trust. It’s cost-effective, and it comes bundled with companionship and group support. School programs, rite-of-passage programs, “men’s shed” building projects, barbershop- and gym-based support — none of this replaces traditional therapy, but we badly need better training for clinicians treating men, given that almost half of young men drop out of therapy by the sixth session.
About a year into my work at the firehouse, an electrical fire knocked out power on my block. A young firefighter I’d counseled — one who’d barely survived a tower collapse — came to check my house for carbon monoxide. After giving me the all-clear, he showed me a photo of his newborn son, born just weeks after 9/11, and another photo of the two of us at a firehouse Christmas party. He seemed content. At peace.
On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, may we remember the fallen and thank the first responders among them. And let us keep honoring the dead by carrying forward what we learned about caring for others and help this new generation of struggling boys and men.
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