Why Men Are Struggling With Mental Health Dr. K HealthyGamer ~ Chris Williamson

I thought my age meant the end of my intimacy. Nothing worked until

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So there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I think we have a misunderstanding. Somewhere along the way, we got the impression that talking about our emotions is the best way to handle them. So I think we have a bias about our understanding of emotions. We think, first of all, they're primarily mental. Secondly, we think that talking about them is the way to go. And therapy is the best evidence-based approach that we've got basically historically of dealing with your emotions. But I think there are a couple of biases. The first is that the majority of therapists are women and the majority of patients are also women historically, which means that if you're looking at a population of And you say, talking about emotions really works for my patients. If you're just a therapist, we don't really segregate between our male patients and our female patients. We sort of like look at this and we say like, this is what works. Now, there are lots of trials that actually show the opposite of that. So we'll have trials on cognitive behavioral therapy that look at 50% men, 50% women, both of them have good effect sizes. But there too, I think there's a selection bias. Because even if you're looking at success in therapy, you're not counting all the people who left.

That didn't go to therapy in the first place.

Because talking about emotions did not work for them. There's even a really interesting paper. So there's a lot of exploration into this. And one paper actually points out that there are two kinds of therapy that you can give. One is what we call emotionally supportive therapy, where you talk about your emotions. And the second is something called instrumental support, which is like problem solving. And what we tend to find is that men prefer problem solving. But if you look at therapy training, we are actively disincentivized to problem solve with our patients. We're not there to solve your problems. So when I was like a second year psychiatry resident and I had this 16 week therapy course where I'm learning the basics of therapy. And, you know, one of the teachers came in and was like, if a patient walks in and says, can you help me find a girlfriend? What's the right answer? And then the right answer is that help me understand why you think you can't find one. Help me understand why you want one. Let's talk about it. The answer is not yes. Right. So as therapists, we're not very good as a whole profession at like helping people solve problems. Right. And I think especially if you look at men, there's a lot of disturbing data on diseases of despair. So between I think like 2009 and 2018, suicide-related diagnoses in people under the age of 18 went up by 287%. So what's happening right now, especially if you look at male mental health, is we're starting to realize that there's another study, for example, that there are a couple of studies that show that somewhere between 37 and 66.7% of men who commit