AASW National Webinar on Multicultural Men’s Mental Health

I was honoured to deliver a national webinar focused on supporting men’s mental health in multicultural communities; a topic that continues to be overlooked, simplified, or addressed too late.

Hosted by the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW), this webinar was developed for social workers and allied practitioners seeking to strengthen their practice with men whose distress is often shaped by migration, stigma, trauma, masculinity, family responsibility, and systemic misunderstanding.

The session, From Silence to Strength: Supporting Men’s Mental Health in Men from CaLD Backgrounds, is now available on demand through AASW.

Why this AASW national webinar matters

This webinar matters because many men from multicultural backgrounds do not arrive in services with distress packaged in familiar ways. They may present through silence, irritability, withdrawal, over-functioning, shame, or delayed help-seeking. Too often, these responses are misread without enough attention to culture, context, and survival.

That creates real risk.

When practitioners focus only on symptoms and not on the conditions shaping those symptoms, men can be misunderstood, disengaged, or assessed without the depth that good practice requires. This is especially important in mental health, community, settlement, and justice settings, where trust and interpretation shape outcomes from the first interaction.

What practitioners took from this AASW national webinar

A central thread throughout this webinar was the need to move beyond surface-level cultural awareness.

Practitioners need more than broad statements about diversity. They need a way of working that can hold culture, masculinity, trauma, migration, language, responsibility, and power together. They need to know how to slow down, ask better questions, and respond without reducing the person in front of them to a stereotype.

This webinar was designed to support that shift.

It explored the barriers that often prevent men from speaking before crisis point. It also offered practical guidance to strengthen engagement, reduce misattunement, and support more culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and psychologically accurate care.

What this AASW national webinar offers organisations and practitioners

For organisations, this webinar offers a credible professional development resource that can support more thoughtful practice across teams working with multicultural communities.

For practitioners, it offers a chance to sharpen clinical judgement and deepen cultural responsiveness in a way that is grounded, practical, and relevant to real-world work.

For leaders and service designers, it reinforces a harder truth: if systems are not built to recognise how distress is shaped by culture, gender, migration, and power, then many men will continue to be seen late, seen poorly, or not seen at all.

A national platform for an urgent conversation

Being invited to deliver an AASW national webinar is meaningful because it reflects growing recognition that multicultural men’s mental health deserves more serious attention within Australian practice.

This work is not about adding cultural language around the edges of existing models. It is about improving how we listen, assess, engage, and respond. It is about building services that can hold complexity without losing the person.

I am grateful to AASW for creating space for this conversation and extending its reach through the on-demand recording.

If your work involves supporting men in mental health, community, settlement, justice, or allied settings, you can access the webinar here:

View the AASW on-demand recording

Based in Perth, WA, LEXs provides telehealth counselling across Australia for individuals, couples, and NDIS participants. Services extend to Social Work supervision, Peer Work supervision, training, and keynote speaking on men’s mental health, CaLD community wellbeing, and culturally responsive suicide prevention; helping people and organisations make mental-health care more compassionate, inclusive, and effective. LEXs provides services across Australia, supporting clients in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and beyond. To learn more about our work across Australia, visit LEXs' services