Las Vegas shooting is part of the wider problem of messed-up men

Was I the only one who reacted this way to the carnage in Las Vegas? A strong wish to not even watch, as the media once again reached saturation coverage of another bloodbath? As if all the world's locales were queueing up to feature in their own horror show.

The sense that this has become a kind of pornography – stirring but pointless – the blurry footage, the up close personal accounts, the inevitable banal life story of yet another male misfit. Does anyone else feel that this is just creating a learned helplessness in us as citizens? The idea that nothing can be done to either prevent or predict? "He seemed so normal." "We can't believe he's done this." These are testimonies not to aberration, but to how poorly we know those we live among, especially if they are men.

Messed-up men define our times. After all, what is Donald Trump but an ego-bound baby-man, spraying the whole planet with his verbal bullets? Causing vast destruction to trust, cohesion and world stability. Toxic masculinity has reached historical heights in a time when we all hoped progressive values would carry us through. We've missed something fatally important, and I think it's the psychology of men.

Masculinity has transformed in my lifetime, from the frozenness of war-damaged men to the loving and engaged young dads of today, but it still has an irreducible nub. The intractable persistence of family violence seems to be the heart of this. We have simply not solved the problem of masculinity, its proneness to turn poisonous; even as we raise millions of warm and caring men, we still fail with millions more.

I have discussed this with domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty, and Louisa Hope, who survived the Lindt Cafe. Both these remarkable women have a universe of reasons to hate men, both from the very first were trenchantly clear – we needed to care for and intervene with men sooner and better. They are interested in solutions, not blame.

Years ago, Australia launched a Men's Helpline. From its opening day, it could not begin to deal with the demand, more than half of callers found that it rang out before answering, and these were the motivated 5 per cent.

From a lifetime of working with men, I would argue there is plenty we can do to solve the problems of alienation, and ugliness in masculine behaviour to others. In fact, we have done so before. A combination of social conditions, biological vulnerability and terrible childhood experience were the drivers behind the incredible reach and harm of alcohol in the early 20th century. It lead to the idealistic but flawed idea of prohibition, it defined social life, drove crime and underlay family disintegration on a massive scale. The effective end to our problems with drinking were to medicalise it, to change attitudes to drunkenness, and provide a worldwide self-help network as a dignified pathway to change. Today Alcoholics Anonymous members are everywhere, you will have friends and workmates, family members perhaps, who quietly attend meetings, look out for each other caringly, and with considerable success. This spectrum of help – educational, clinical, community based – needs to be brought to bear on the problems of men.

Messed-up men need to be identified, as early as possible in an unblaming way, preferably while still boys at school. But failing that, as adult males clearly disintegrating, they need to be dealt with just as confrontingly as in AA and offered long-term support, intensive treatment when needed, ways to forestall the risk phases of their lives. TED speaker Brené Brown identified it so well – that everything good in life depends on being vulnerable – the one thing damaged men have not learned. No closeness, no healthy relating, no healing or relief is possible without letting down our defences. Messed-up men don't do this, they have been taught by family, culture and circumstance to be walking time bombs. They'll keep spilling blood and destroying lives, until we provide safe spaces for them to change, on a very large scale. We have to, and we can do something about men. Our lives depend on it.

Steve Biddulph is the author of Raising Boys and The New Manhood.