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Why Looking After Your Feelings is Looking After Your Health.

A character in a Woody Allan movie once said that he doesn’t get angry, he just grows tumours!  Instinctively we all know that there is an intimate link between our emotional wellbeing and our physical health … but is there any evidence to link the two realms?

In fact the evidence that connects the health of the mind with the health of the body is overwhelming.  If you have a bought of stress, for example, you are more likely to experience a cough or a cold.  If you suffer from chronic (long term) stress, you are more likely to develop cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, motor neurone disease … and in fact a whole range of other diseases.  In other words, if you don’t find a way of dealing with your emotional problems, your body will find a way of expressing them for you.

The science that explores the mind body link is called psychoneuroimmunology.  I know it’s a mouthful.  It basically looks at how the emotional system, immunune system, nervous system and endocrine system work as a unified whole.  The basic finding is that psychological stress suppresses the immune system.  If the immune system is suppressed, disease cannot be controlled by the body, and is therefore expressed as symptoms.

The implications of this research is that if you want to live a healthy life, or you want to have the best chance of curing a physical illness, you need to consider ways of processing your emotional pain.  Denial and suppression, quite simply, is lethal. 

In one study, a cohort of cancer patients was randomly divided into two groups.  One received treatment as usual; the other was given six sessions of group support and psychotherapy.  The death rate of the group offered a chance to emotionally heal was one third of the death rate of those who received treatment as usual.

If such a simple intervention can save lives, why is emotional healing given such a low priority in conventional medicine? 

Well one reason is the very idea of the mind body split itself.  It is a peculiarly western phenomenon, which other systems of healing, such as Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, refuse to follow.  Yet it is anti-scientific.  You cannot, from a scientific point of view, hold that the mind and the body are separate entities.  The physician Dr Gabor Mate, in his book “When the Body says No:  Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection” suggested that mind-body research in medicine disappears into a ‘Bermuda Triangle’.  That is to say, it is consistently produced, but rarely taken up by the medical profession itself.

This, of course, is unsurprising.  The myth of medicine is that there are discreet disease entities with physical causes that can be reliably diagnosed and treated with discreet surgical or pharmacological interventions.  The model makes available a vast medical industrial complex for financial exploitation by business.  The subtle, time consuming and messy business of emotional processing of childhood trauma and working through the implications for acceptance and autonomy in adult life is less easily commercially standardised and exploitable. 

Yet it’s what we need to do if we don’t want our emotions to kill us.

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

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and Skype counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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Mentally Ill at Risk of Violent Attack.

A shocking new study published in the Lancet revealed that people with mental health problems are four times more likely to be a victim of violence than the general population.  In the report which looked at 26 studies from developed nations, as many as a quarter of people with mental health problems have been attacked in the last year.

What this research clearly demonstrates is that far from the mentally ill being a threat to society, it is society which is a threat to the mentally ill.  Mentally ill people are ten times more likely to be a victim of a violent attack than the perpetrator of the attack.

Disturbing as these findings are, they are unsurprising.  As a society we are intolerant of behaviour that falls outside fairly conservative norms.  Mental health problems often leave people behaving in apparently strange or unusual ways.  Someone who is agoraphobic is going to look pretty scared in open spaces.  Someone who is depressed is likely to be caught up with themselves, and miss out on the usual social pleasantries. We expect people to behave in a certain way, and when they don’t, we feel threatened. 

Perhaps our post industrial culture is also partly to blame.  We prize scientific rationality and are deeply suspicious of the irrational.  Indeed ‘the irrational’ is something many of the so called ‘less developed’ nations are less scared of, and this is something we can learn from.

Given that anybody can experience poor mental health at some point in their life, what is needed is greater understanding and tolerance of mental illness. 

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

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and Skype counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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Feral Britain - Challenging the Normal Natural Order?

Last night I set out for Rusholme for a drink and a curry with a mate. When we met at the pub we were turned away. The venue was shutting down in anticipation that the riots were moving in our direction. I felt profoundly disturbed. We found another pub that was remaining open. There were very few customers, but I did talk to one man who had been caught in the city centre violence unable to escape for three hours. I had heard enough. I walked home to the scene of emergency vehicles roaming the streets, lights flashing, and busloads of police officers being driven around the city.

Of course my experience is not unusual. The riots that have swept the country have caught millions in their repercussions. There is a palpable sense of unease running throughout our urban centres. The fact that government and the police are themselves behind the curve simply feeds our insecurity. We looked to authority to give a lead, and our helplessness is compounded when we see them reduced, like ourselves, to bystanders.

How should we make sense of our feelings? One way of looking at this is to understand that we construct a social world in which there is a "normal natural order". Through our life's experience, we form a view of how the world works. This is not just a description of the social world, it is also a moral prescription. We expect the world to work in a certain way, and hold the world morally accountable if it does not conform to our expectations.

The normal natural order permeates everything that we do. For example we expect that people die at the end of their natural lives. When an individual dies tragically young, we feel aggrieved, and struggle to make sense of the death. The death of a young person challenges the normal natural order. It is a moral dislocation of our social compass.

When it comes to rioting, I would suggest, we also have a normal natural order. Civil disorder ensues when there is political anger, and that anger is projected onto our symbols of authority, not least the police. The race riots of the 1980s, the poll tax riots, and the G8 riots all fall into this category. So does the civil unrest that is sweeping the Moslem world. Such civil unrest may be distressing for those caught up in it, but it doesn’t threaten our understanding of the kind of world we live in.

What we have experienced in feral Britain over the last few days breaks with the normal natural order. We have seen a different kind of riot. It is rioting for the sake of criminality. The rioters are focused on looting and dodge, rather than confront the authorities. It is little wonder police tactics are behind the curve.

In challenging the normal natural order, feral Britain is also deeply and profoundly disturbing. Like a young death, we are left trying to make sense of what is going on. Why do so many of our fellow citizens feel that this is an acceptable way to behave? For how long can we expect this new form of civil unrest to go on? What does this mean for the future of our society?

Disjuncts to the normal natural order are deeply unsettling. Until a new consensus emerges that makes sense of the events we are living through, we can expect to remain unsettled. But that new consensus will emerge, and when it does, our faith in the predictability of the social order will be restored. With it, our sense of security will also return. But it will take time.

 

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

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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About This Blog

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Book Review: The Women Racket – The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society by Steve Moxon.

Have you ever been stumped in an argument with a feminist?  If so then this book is for you!

The overarching claim of feminism is that men systematically oppress women due to patriarchy.  Patriarchy, of course, is differently evoked as both a description of the current state of affairs, and an explanation of it.  Moxon attacks the very notion of patriarchy itself.  Drawing on evolutionary psychology he argues that women, far from being oppressed by men, are in a socially privileged position.  Rather it is the large number of low status males that dominate most societies that are oppressed, by both women and other men.

This, of course, is an incendiary idea and goes against the normative view of received political correctness.  It seems to me that his view goes further, to imply that feminism itself is a way of oppressing men and preserves and enhances women’s privileged position.

Moxons argument is essentially a simple one.  Women are the limiting factor of reproduction in the human species whereas men are, from an evolutionary perspective, dispensable.  The genetic variation in men is therefore more widespread and is the source of genetic competition between men for access to women.  Men, he claims, because they compete amongst themselves for access to women, organise themselves into the dominance hierarchies with which we are so familiar.  Women, he claims, are attracted to high status males leaving the majority of low status males sexually and socially disadvantaged.

Moxon takes this position and applies it to a wide variety of feminist gripes.  From female suffrage to pornography, and gender dynamics at work to accusations of rape, Moxon tries to demolish the feminist edifice and proposes an alternative narrative, that it is the vast majority of men, not women that are devalued in society.

 It is certainly true that Moxon has focussed in on an extremely powerful alternative narrative to feminism.  Evolutionary psychology, an approach I have a lot of sympathy with, offers a radical reconceptualisation of gender relations.  Moxon, however, is not a scientist, and at times I was not convinced that his reliance on evolutionary psychology justified all the claims he was making for it.  No science, however, is politically neutral, and perhaps it needs a journalist of Moxon’s calibre to point out the political implications for us.

 

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

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK
• Group therapy weekends for men

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About This Blog

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