MENS-WELLBEING.COM: Mental Health

Mental Health

28 November 2011

Anorexia in Men.

As we move into winter living, with the cold weather and dark nights upon us, for many of us our energies start to flag, and we look forward to the Christmas and New Year festivities. For some men, though, the festive season brings new challenges. With its emphasis on food and drink, men with eating disorders can feel particularly challenged. To mark this difficult time, I will focus my posts in the run-up to the New Year on eating disorders in men.

For many, "eating disorders" is synonymous with anorexia, but this is just one of several ways in which men experience eating distress. But what is anorexia in men?

The headline with anorexia is that the man restricts his intake of food to such an extent he becomes dangerously thin. When a man is this thin his brain is not sufficiently fuelled by nutrients, and this distorts his thinking further, and the illness can spiral out of control. If your body fat falls below 15% of your mass you are in the danger zone of anorexia. If you continue to restrict your intake of food, you may die.

Why do men get anorexia? The vulnerable time for men is in the teen years. It is during this period that we compare our physical capabilities and attractiveness with other boys. Not surprisingly, unlike girls, where our anorexia is motivated by the fear of fat, anorexia in men is often motivated by a desire to build a better physique. Anorexia in men is often associated with excessive exercise.

Trends in the media represent male beauty as involving a flat stomach with rippling abdominal muscles. For most men abdominal muscles are not visible until our body fat is at or below 14%. This is a dangerously low level to maintain our body fat. In fact professional models often "strip down" their body fat before a photo shoot and then allow it to creep up again after the shoot.

Representations of male beauty and what it means to be a man is only part of the story. For many men, they already have low self-worth before they started dieting and exercising excessively. In this sense anorexia might be a symptom of more complex underlying problems around feeling valued by family and friends. A proportion of anorexic men have had experiences of being bullied early in childhood for being overweight.

For many men with anorexia, their emotional world is extremely painful. Anorexia, if anything, is a way of coping with that pain. In a dark emotional world, sometimes controlling your weight is the only control you feel you have left.

For further information and support check out the Men Get Eating Disorders Too website.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

About This Blog

Posted by Dr Phil Tyson on 28 November 2011 at 08:36 PM in Eating Disorders, Mental Health | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

02 November 2011

New Hope for Treatment Resistant Depression.

Depression can affect anyone. Unfortunately once you’ve had one bought of depression, you are more likely to have a second. Quickly your condition can become chronic. Although standard psychological and medical methods can help most people with chronic depression, there is a hard core of people who are ‘treatment resistant’. Whatever we do simply doesn’t seem to work. As many as 30% of chronic depression cases fall into this category.

Exciting new research by Professor Thomas Lynch of Southampton University and his collaborators promises to offer insight into the world of people with chronic treatment resistant depression, and possibly offer a solution.

What Professor Lynch has found is that many people with treatment resistant depression are emotionally over controlled. Emotional control is best seen as a continuum. At one end are people who are not very good at controlling their emotions. They are life’s ‘drama queens’, and have learnt that they are more likely to get what they want if they escalating their emotion. At the other end of the spectrum are people who are extremely good at regulating their emotion, in fact they are so good at it hardly anything slips through. They are lifes cool guys, and have learnt that they are more likely to get what they want if they withhold their emotional expression.

Of course being able to control one’s emotion in many situations is a good thing. What Professor Lynch and colleagues have found, however, is that if you withhold too much emotion, this creates mistrust in other people. Basically if you don’t show an appropriate socially acceptable amount of emotion, other people don’t like you. And this is the problem for many treatment resistant depression patients. They are so good at regulating their emotional expression they do it inappropriately. This makes them unpopular. As a consequence of this they become socially withdrawn. Of course if you do not connect effectively with people you can become vulnerable to depression.

Professor Lynch’s approach to treatment resistant depression is therefore quite radical. He does not treat depression as the primary problem. Rather his treatment strategy is to target emotional over control itself. By helping patients to communicate their emotions more appropriately, this enables them to get closer to other people; they become more popular, and as a consequence, social isolation and the vulnerability to depression decrease.

Does it work? Well preliminary findings suggest this approach may well be effective in helping patients with treatment resistant depression. The findings have been so good in fact it has led to a full scale clinical trial over the next five years. The project is called REFRAMED. If you feel this approach might be appropriate for you, you don’t have to wait until these results become available. Professor Lynch is starting to roll out his ideas to other therapists. You might not be able to get on the clinical trial, but you could well be able to access something very similar.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

About This Blog

Posted by Dr Phil Tyson on 02 November 2011 at 05:34 PM in Academic, Depression, Mental Health, Psychology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

06 September 2011

The Courage of Compassion.

Anger is a cheap emotion. We don't have to work hard in order to get angry, it just manifests itself, almost automatically. Of course there is nothing wrong, as such, with anger. As an animal, it is our first line of defence against attack. But for far too many of us, our mental lives become clouded by an almost constant angry emotional tone. It is as if we are constantly angry at just about everybody almost all of the time.

For men, so it seems, anger can be a particular problem. Some men feel that anger is the only emotion they are allowed to express. All negative emotions, like anxiety, fear, dread, doubt, jealousy, insecurity, etc, get expressed as anger. As boys many men also had angry fathers. We learned that to be a man we had to be angry, and even follow through on our anger, into aggression and violence.

Compassion, on the other hand, is an expensive emotion. It rarely appears spontaneously. In fact we need to work hard to develop compassion for others. We cannot take it for granted. This is especially the case if we are caught up in our anger almost all of the time. In fact cultivating compassion, a sympathetic understanding of another person's situation, allows other more refined emotions to develop, like care, love and even joy.

For some men, those that believe that to be a man means being angry, developing compassion and goodwill towards others is itself a threat to who they think they are. But if you are serious about leaving your angry life behind, this is what you need to do. When anger arises, use this as a cue to understand, compassionately, the other person's point of view. Over time your anger will get transformed, and your perspective on the world will become improved, much happier and calmer.

To turn from anger to compassion is a bold step. It requires effort, yes, but it requires much more than that. It requires courage. The courage to leave behind a very powerful, but unhelpful, view of what it means to be a man. For some men it is the most courageous thing they will ever choose to do.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:

About This Blog

Posted by Dr Phil Tyson on 06 September 2011 at 05:46 PM in Mental Health | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

25 August 2011

Emotion Phobia in Men.

Working with a wide range of men, I am struck that the stereotype of men being unemotional is simply not true. Men, like women, fall on the spectrum from those who are extremely comfortable and aware of their emotional worlds, to those who, simply, aren't.

Of course we are all emotional creatures. Everything we experience we do so with an emotional tone. We see a beautiful woman, and we feel attraction. We see the England football team, and we feel disappointment.

Some men, however, have become scared of their emotional lives. They choose to see themselves as "rational", and become distrustful of emotions in themselves and others. They have become emotion phobic.

There are three problems with emotion phobia. The first is that emotions are a social lubricant that oils our relationships with other people. If we don't pay attention to our own emotions, or value those of others, we can become remote, unconnected and socially isolated figures.

The second is that emotion phobic’s, like everybody else, can experience emotional disorders. Depression and anxiety can affect any one of us and are pretty devastating. If we are emotion phobic and become depressed or anxious, we may experience these things more acutely, not less.

Finally, there is our relationship with women. Because of the development of the female brain, women often have a more acutely aware sense of their emotional lives. Women are simply more interested in emotions as a result. If you are emotion phobic, you will spend a lifetime misunderstanding women and what they need from you.

Can anything be done? Well I believe there is. Many men can benefit from an exploration of their emotional lives. Getting in touch with your feelings doesn't mean crying all the time either. If you're not scared of your emotions, you will experience more of the positive emotions too, like love, joy, peace and contentment. In many ways it's about allowing yourself to become more fully alive.

Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers: