\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>n a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. \u201cI was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren\u2019t real,\u201d he says. \u201cIt got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: \u2018Don\u2019t do that \u2013 you\u2019ll miss the sunset.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launching into a poem inspired by his Moroccan breakdown, You\u2019ll Miss the Sunset. \u201cThe world is so beautiful, the least you could do is stick around to watch it,\u201d he says with the hint of a smirk. \u201cBut it\u2019s all shit, all of it, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n The crowd of mostly young men and women laugh as Browne gallops through the rest of his set, tackling everything from sexual assault to accidental overdoses and male loneliness. Talking in plain terms and swearwords more than lofty metaphor, he is a poet with a mission, he says: to change the way men see themselves and support each other.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to offer up an alternative masculinity from the one that boys have been trained to live,\u201d he says. \u201cIf one way that can happen is through poetry, I\u2019m very happy to lead this movement.\u201d<\/p>\n It might seem like a tall order but Browne\u2019s blend of brutal honesty and droll observation has made him a viral sensation. Counting over 160,000 followers on Instagram, and with videos of his performances regularly attracting millions of views on social media, Browne has turned his teenage experiences into energetic performance poems that aim to skewer our perceptions of mental health and masculinity. It is only 18 months since he began regularly performing at open mic nights, but he has already quit his job as a teaching assistant to tour the country and perform full time. On the face of it, he is living the dream. But it has come at a price.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had death threats, people calling me slurs online and even Andrew Tate posting a meme of me on his X account,\u201d Browne says the day after his performance, when we meet in a quiet corner of the National Theatre in London. \u201cI have a love-hate relationship with social media because you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to get when you open your messages. We\u2019ve created an environment where people can live on their phones and ignore the world. Men can find simple scapegoats for their problems, and they can avoid what really needs to change. But what I\u2019m trying to do is to use social media to force them to feel something raw and honest \u2013 it\u2019s a confrontation where they least expect it.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a tactic that first gained traction in February 2025 when Browne released a video of his poem Silly Billy and quickly gained more than 15m views. Weaving together statistics on sexual violence with nostalgia-inducing tales of school mischief, Browne\u2019s two-minute poem concludes with an anecdote about a character, Billy, who assaults a girl at a party. One refrain in particular caused the poem to go viral: \u201cBillys aren\u2019t evil, they\u2019re failures of a system \/ A misguided form of discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018For every death threat, I would get far more people messaging me to say my work had changed their perspective.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cI wrote it when I realised how prevalent sexual assault is,\u201d Browne says. \u201cI spoke to my female friends and found out it\u2019s something that has happened to almost every woman. I was just ashamed that I had to actually see their pain to understand the extent of it, and the poem was trying to find a different way to get that message across. Rather than just singling out a perpetrator as a rotten apple, it\u2019s actually a rotten system.\u201d<\/p>\n The poem soon reached far-right circles, causing Tate, a leading proponent of the manosphere with 11 million followers, to mock it in a now-deleted post on his X account. The backlash was so severe Browne thought he might be entering psychosis once again. \u201cI was receiving absurd levels of hate and dissociating. It got really bad,\u201d he says. \u201cBut for every death threat, I would get far more people messaging me to say my work had changed their perspective. Although the experience was awful, they were watching and the poem was cutting through.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markI wrote a couple of poems out of curiosity but I didn\u2019t want anyone to see them as I thought people would call me gay<\/p>\n Browne may not fit most people\u2019s image of a professional poet \u2013 but he didn\u2019t grow up knowing what one should look like. He had never read or engaged with poetry seriously until 2025, and the last book he finished was Navy Seal David Goggins\u2019 motivational bestseller Can\u2019t Hurt Me, when he was 15.<\/p>\n \u201cI wrote a couple of poems just out of curiosity when I was 14 but I didn\u2019t want anyone to see them as I thought people would call me gay,\u201d says Browne, who grew up in Southend in Essex and left school at 18. \u201cAndrew Tate started getting popular when I was 17 but we all believed what he was saying before he said it. I became obsessed with the idea of being a man through getting ripped and making money \u2013 we all need purpose, especially at that age, and it fed into that. I didn\u2019t hate women but there were elements [of that mindset] I believed in.\u201d<\/p>\n Raised by his mother, who works as a language teacher, and father, a communications consultant, Browne describes spending his school years masquerading as a different person. \u201cI grew up in Love Island country. It\u2019s a look-obsessed culture, a geezer town, and I grew up as a \u2018lad\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cI would spend most of my time at the pub talking about football and women, but it wasn\u2019t who I really was. I realise in hindsight that my queerness was trying to get out.\u201d He now identifies as bisexual.<\/p>\n He was 13 when he smoked weed for the first time, and he traces his mental health problems back to overuse of the drug. \u201cI remember getting very drunk and high when I was 15 and feeling something snap in my brain. I wasn\u2019t the same again for years after that,\u201d he says. \u201cI was depressed, on antidepressants and ADHD medication, and at 17 I developed this irrational fear of sleep. It felt as if I would die if I went to sleep, since it seemed like reality only existed while I was awake. That was my first episode of psychosis \u2013 it felt like the world was moving too slowly and I was going to explode.\u201d<\/p>\n Thankfully, Browne sought help from his parents, attended NHS therapy and quit drugs. He turned his attention to standup as a way to channel his emotions and began travelling to London to perform at open mic nights.<\/p>\n On stage in dingy pub basements, though, he struggled to find a sense of community. \u201cMost of the time in standup a good portion of the audience wants you to be bad so they can shout shit at you,\u201d he says. \u201cThey want to see you struggle. And I would do gigs wherever I could, including one where two fights broke out while I was on stage, even though there were only eight people in the audience. It\u2019s crazy to think I went through all that when I was a teenager.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>By August 2025 Browne had quit his job and was spending his weeks rehearsing and performing.<\/span> Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n After leaving school, he decided to travel around Australia and south-east Asia, teaching English as a foreign language online. It was during his time abroad that he had an awakening: he discovered his sexuality, found poetry once more and finally relinquished his teen lad culture.<\/p>\n \u201cI gradually realised that all of that manosphere stuff was just a grift \u2013 they were only out to make money and they didn\u2019t have any solutions. I ended up in Indonesia instead, surrounded by free-spirited people who encouraged me to express myself,\u201d he says. \u201cI wrote three poems there just about my life and experiences to date, and while I didn\u2019t really do anything with them, it broke the seal.\u201d<\/p>\n His mental health remained a challenge, resulting in another psychotic episode while he was in Morocco \u2013 the one he refers to in his sunset poem. After returning from his travels and moving back in with his parents, he describes falling into \u201ca pit of depression\u201d. It wasn\u2019t until he decided to move in with his 96-year-old grandmother in London in 2024 that things took a turn for the better.<\/p>\n He began taking poetry more seriously and attending as many open mic nights as he could. He read work by writers such as Wendy Cope, Matthew Dickman and David Berman, finding a sweet spot in poetry that was accessible to readers but still contained a message. By January 2025, videos of his energetic performances were beginning to find an audience online and he started booking his own shows.<\/p>\n double quotation markYou can\u2019t tell a 14-year-old boy what to do. You have to show them there\u2019s another way to be a man<\/p>\n How does he feel about having so many of his personal struggles available for public consumption? \u201cPeople know a lot about a very specific part of me and I\u2019m comfortable with talking about my mental health because everyone has it,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s vulnerable but it seems worth it since a poet\u2019s job is to be honest. We need people speaking about the ugly realities of mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n He believes this radical honesty is the only way that boys and young men can be led away from damaging role models such as Tate. \u201cYou can\u2019t address it head-on and tell a 14-year-old boy what to do \u2013 they\u2019ll just laugh at you,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to show them there\u2019s another way to be a man. They\u2019re only one good role model or PSHE [personal, social, health and economic education] lesson away from changing their worldview, but equally they can be easily swayed another way. We have to be vulnerable and show them it\u2019s OK to talk to each other openly.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from the occasional online pile-on, Browne believes his poems and videos are making a difference. \u201cI get so many messages from people thinking they were going to take their own life and then they would see a video of mine at 2am and it stopped them,\u201d he says. \u201cGrowing up I didn\u2019t think the phrase \u2018You saved my life\u2019 would be said to me as often as it is, but I do it for myself, too, as it saved me.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018We have to be vulnerable.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of Samuel Browne<\/p>\n What next for Sam Browne? \u201cI\u2019m working on a book, as well as hopefully some longer-form video content on YouTube and maybe a podcast,\u201d he says. \u201cThe manosphere is dead and no one cares about Tate any more. Now it\u2019s pseudo-intellectuals and right-wing commentators on podcasts espousing the same message in a different form, and it will go on to shift again. We need to keep changing with it because if we resort to just name-calling, we\u2019ll only push them further down the rabbit hole.\u201d<\/p>\n He feels his mental health is stable. He no longer speaks to his childhood friends from home, attends therapy when he needs to and has found a new community in poetry. \u201cPoetry accepts everybody, especially those who\u2019ve spent their lives feeling outcast. It\u2019s a place they will be heard,\u201d he says. \u201cI genuinely believe I\u2019ll be OK now \u2013 I just want every poem to be a reason for someone reading or listening to stay alive.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/em>Sam Browne and Friends runs every two months at 93 Feet East, London. The next show is on 23 April. He is also touring the UK with his show The Manosphere and Other Fun Shapes<\/p>\n In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org<\/em><\/p>\n