The 3.6 Million Male Caregivers Canada Forgot
Read time: 9 minutes
- 46% of Canada’s caregivers are men (~3.6 million), but support systems are designed almost exclusively for women – leaving male caregivers without appropriate resources or recognition.
- Male caregivers face unique mental health risks – they’re more socially isolated, less likely to seek help until crisis point, and show greater increases in depression/anxiety over time than female caregivers.
- This hidden crisis demands urgent attention – with 3 of 4 Canadian suicides being men, caregiving stress combined with isolation creates a dangerous situation requiring male-specific support strategies and inclusion in men’s health initiatives like Movember.
Close your eyes and picture a Canadian caregiver.
You probably saw a woman – a daughter managing her father’s medication schedule, a wife navigating her husband’s doctor appointments, a mother caring for an adult child with disabilities. And you wouldn’t be wrong to picture this. According to Statistics Canada’s 2022 data, 52% of caregivers are women, and their burden is real, documented, and increasingly recognized.1 But here’s what we miss: nearly half of Canada’s caregivers are men.
Statistics Canada reported that in 2012, approximately 46% of all family caregivers were male – a dramatic shift from previous decades when 80% of caregivers were women.2 That’s approximately 3.6 million Canadian men who are bathing parents, managing feeding tubes, learning to cook for the first time at sixty-five, and watching their spouses forget their names.
They’re facing a completely different crisis, and virtually nobody has designed support systems with them in mind.
As Movember reminds us to focus on men’s health – mental health, suicide prevention, prostate and testicular cancer – we need to add male caregiving to that conversation. Because the silence around male caregivers isn’t just an oversight. It’s contributing to a mental health crisis hiding in plain sight.
The Invisible Army
David was fifty-eight when his wife received her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. A retired electrician, he’d spent four decades fixing problems – rewiring houses, troubleshooting circuits, finding solutions. Suddenly, he faced a problem with no solution, only management. And he had no idea where to start.
“I couldn’t fix her,” he said. “That was the hardest part. I kept thinking if I just found the right doctor, the right supplement, the right routine… but you can’t fix Alzheimer’s. You can only watch it take someone away piece by piece.”
David represents a pattern male caregivers face and researchers are finally beginning to document. Men frequently become caregivers suddenly – for their spouses, primarily – without the gradual skill-building many women experience through child-rearing. While women often grow into caregiving roles across decades, learning to manage complex needs incrementally, many men are thrown into intensive caregiving with no preparation.
Caregiving skills aren’t always intuitive. Older men who spent fifty years as primary breadwinners while wives managed the household now find themselves cooking, cleaning, medication-managing, and emotionally supporting – often for the first time.At sixty or seventy, they’re simultaneously grieving their partner’s decline and learning to manage a household they never ran.
Why Male Caregivers Struggle to Ask for Help
Research from Quebec suggests that male caregivers are more reluctant than women to seek help from family members, close friends, or community healthcare services.4 This reluctance is partly linked to a perceived contradiction between masculine identity and seeking help. A 2024 scoping review noted that male caregivers are less likely to have background experience in basic activities of daily care, which leads to increased stress levels.5
Male caregivers wait significantly longer to ask for professional help compared to female caregivers. They’re more likely to reach crisis point – physical exhaustion, financial collapse, mental health emergency – before accepting support. This isn’t because men are stubborn or foolish. It’s because admitting you need help feels like admitting you’ve failed at your fundamental role: providing and protecting.
The Loneliness Crisis
Women caregivers often face isolation, but male caregivers face something more profound: invisibility.
The system excludes them at every turn:
- Support groups are overwhelmingly female spaces
- Marketing for caregiving resources features women
- Healthcare providers default to addressing the daughter, not the son
The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging found something startling: male spousal or adult-child caregivers were more likely to be socially isolated over time than their female counterparts.6 The research revealed that male caregivers tend to narrow social connections after becoming a family caregiver, or resist seeking support from informal or formal resources due to gender role expectations.
Men are statistically less likely to join support groups or seek emotional help. Some of this reflects masculine socialization around emotional expression. But some reflects genuinely inhospitable spaces. Imagine being the only man in a room of fifteen women discussing caregiving strategies. Even with the best intentions from everyone involved, you’re an outsider.
This isolation has measurable consequences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian research found that while female caregivers reported higher baseline levels of depressive symptoms and anxiety, male caregivers exhibited a greater increase in these symptoms over time.7 The study’s authors suggested this pattern may indicate that male caregivers have less developed coping processes and support networks than their female counterparts.
Male caregivers are more likely to:
- Externalize stress through anger, withdrawal, or increased alcohol consumption rather than expressing sadness or seeking therapy
- Skip their own medical appointments
- Delay seeking help until crisis point
One Canadian study found that male caregivers had reduced odds of seeing a physician within the last six months compared to women – but were more likely to require hospitalization, perhaps because they hadn’t attended to health issues in a timely fashion.8
The mental health crisis among male caregivers intersects directly with Movember’s core mission. In Canada, three out of four suicides are by men.9 Caregiving stress, combined with social isolation and untreated depression, creates a perfect storm. We have men who are exhausted, lonely, grieving, and conditioned not to ask for help.
Gender Bias in the Workplace
Male caregivers who work full time may face additional challenges. Employers and colleagues often don’t expect men, especially younger men, to need caregiving flexibility. Women requesting reduced hours or flexible scheduling to care for family members encounter bias, but it’s expected bias. Men making the same requests often face confusion or skepticism.
A 2022 Canadian study found significant gender differences in how workplace support affects employed family caregivers: women required workplaces with at least five types of support to mitigate negative mental health outcomes, while men only needed two or three types of support – yet men were less likely to access any support.10
Why This Matters for Movember
Movember exists because men’s health – physical and mental – requires specific attention. Men die younger. Men complete suicide at dramatically higher rates. Men underutilize mental health services. Men ignore physical symptoms until crisis.
The same patterns that make Movember necessary make the male caregiver crisis urgent.
According to Movember’s “Real Face of Men’s Health” report for Canada, more than two in five men (44%) living in Canada will die before the age of 75, with largely preventable causes being the leading contributors.12 The report emphasizes that when a man suffers, it’s not just his health on the line – it’s his partner, his kids, his parents (often women) who carry the weight. They’re losing sleep, taking time off work, sacrificing their own wellbeing. Caregivers are the invisible casualties of Canada’s men’s health crisis.
The men growing mustaches this November to raise awareness about prostate cancer and suicide prevention need to also be talking about caregiving. Because caregiving stress is a men’s health issue. Male caregiver isolation is a mental health crisis. And the 3.6 million male caregivers in Canada are drowning in silence.
Read Part 2: Building Support Systems Male Caregivers Actually Need (Coming Soon)
In Part 2, we’ll explore the solutions: what male caregivers actually need, how systems can change, why workplace policies matter, and the urgent call for a National Caregiving Strategy that sees – and serves – the 3.6 million men Canada forgot.
Footnotes
- Statistics Canada. (2022). “More than half of women provide care to children and care-dependent adults in Canada, 2022.” The Daily. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221108/dq221108b-eng.htm ↩
- Maynard, K., & Williams, A. (2017). “Male Caregiver-Employees: A Qualitative Analysis of Men Involved in Informal Care and Full-Time Work.” McMaster University. Statistics Canada estimated in 2012 that nearly 46% of all caregivers in Canada were male. https://ghw.mcmaster.ca/projects/gender-health-and-carer-friendly-workplaces/project-1-2-2-4/ ↩
- Statistics Canada. (2022). “The Daily — More than half of women provide care to children and care-dependent adults in Canada, 2022.” https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221108/dq221108b-eng.htm ↩
- Akouamba, B.S., et al. (2025). “Male caregivers: a scoping review of impacts, needs, challenges, and best practices.” Discover Health Systems. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44250-025-00285-9 ↩
- Akouamba, B.S., et al. (2025). “Male caregivers: a scoping review of impacts, needs, challenges, and best practices.” Discover Health Systems, 3(1):89. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44250-025-00285-9 ↩
- Li, L., Lee, Y., Xu, X., et al. (2021). “Social Isolation Among Spousal and Adult-Child Caregivers: Findings From the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 76(8), 1580-1589. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33170276/ ↩
- Wister, A., Li, L., Mitchell, B., et al. (2022). “Levels of Depression and Anxiety Among Informal Caregivers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Study Based on the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 77(9), 1740-1757. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35150268/ ↩
- Mitchell, L.A., et al. (2024). “But at What Cost? Healthcare Utilization of Canadian Carer-Employees.” Healthcare, PMC11675624. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11675624/ ↩
- Movember Canada. (2024). “Mental Health & Suicide Prevention.” https://ca.movember.com/about/mental-health ↩
- Li, L., Lee, Y., & Lai, D.W.L. (2022). “Mental Health of Employed Family Caregivers in Canada: A Gender-Based Analysis on the Role of Workplace Support.” Journal of Family Issues. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9554159/ ↩
- Statistics Canada. (2022). “More than half of women provide care to children and care-dependent adults in Canada, 2022.” https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221108/dq221108b-eng.htm ↩