3 Mental Health Issues Men Struggle With More Than Women

Talking points: psychology, depression,

These are 3 conditions you may have never heard of before, but based on my experience working with men for 10+ years, they’ve got a significant presence. They’re also under-discussed.

(00:00:00) – Dysthymia, aka low-key depression

(00:04:25) – Alexithymia, when you can’t describe emotions

(00:07:06) – Derealization, when nothing feels real

Further Reading

-Dysthymia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia

-Alexithymia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia

-Derealization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derealization

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Transcript

All right, man, welcome back to the ManTalks Show. Connor Beaton here. And today we’re gonna be talking about three mental health issues that men generally struggle with more than women.

Now, I don’t have a peer reviewed research paper to back this up. This is based off of 10,000, 15,000 plus hours of working with men over the last decade. And so we’re gonna dive in because I find that these three things are things that men are struggling with that oftentimes either go, we can call it undiagnosed or unrecognized within men. And I’m gonna try and speak to how you can move through each one of these.

So the first one that I want to talk about is dysthymia. This is a persistent mild form of depression. It’s kind of like a low-grade depression that doesn’t really lift. And it’s not so bad that it’s debilitating. I kind of call it functional depression. It’s like a guy is always a little sad. He’s kind of got like a little bit of cloud of Eeyore around him, but he still does life. He’s still social. He’s still out doing things. You still go to the gym a couple times a week or you still function, right? It’s kind of like a low-grade functioning alcoholic. You’re not full-blown. You’re not missing work. You’re not so bad that people are questioning you about whether or not you should have that next Jack Daniels. It’s just kind of like low-grade.

And the reason why I bring this one up and share it first is that this is the experience that many men have that doesn’t get addressed in therapy often. And this is the experience that many men have because they feel a kind of uselessness in their life. They’re like, I don’t really feel like I have much going for me. I don’t really feel like I have direction. I don’t really feel like I have really solid connections. And so there’s kind of like this consistent and persistent low-grade sadness and cloud and loneliness that they live inside of and they can’t really shake.

It’s like I think it was Linus from Snoopy, right? The one with the blanket and had like the cloud around him and he was sort of like always following him around. That was more like traditional depression, but this is kind of like a low-grade depression. Now there’s a couple of ways to deal with this consistent and persistent low-grade depression.

Number one, working out and meditation. In the UK, they prescribe meditation for depression. It has been clinically shown to be as effective, if not more effective, than a lot of SSRIs that are on the market. Working out, same thing. It has been clinically shown to improve your self-perception, your sense of self-worth. It can really help to restore some of the challenges that you’re feeling internally.

So for a lot of men that are struggling with dysthymia, what I’ve noticed is that oftentimes they are very inconsistent. The low-grade depression is the main consistent thing that they have in their life. They’re not consistently working out. They’re not consistently meditating. They’re not consistently doing breath work. They don’t have a very sort of robust or rigorous quality of ritual or routine in their life.

And usually when we are lacking that type of rigorous routine, something will take its place. And this is usually what takes its place. Now that can also be contributed by unhealed, undealt with childhood trauma, abuse, abandonment, neglect, those types of things. So I don’t want to discredit those things. They can absolutely contribute to dysthymia. But for a lot of men, what I’ve noticed is that they are lacking in this daily ritual of meeting their edge, of pushing themselves in some way, shape, or form that feels good.

It’s like doing a hard thing that feels good, doing a hard thing that leaves you respecting yourself a little bit more on a consistent, regular basis. So that’s dysthymia. That’s how I would suggest starting to address it. Obviously, working with a therapist or a psychologist or a really skilled coach can also serve you.

The next one, alexithymia. Alexithymia is the inability to describe or even recognize and acknowledge your own emotions. Now I’ve worked with men that have a little bit of a spectrum on this one. So I’ve noticed that there’s varying degrees of alexithymia. Some men, they struggle to acknowledge or recognize any emotion that isn’t anger. Other men can recognize anger and happiness and sadness, and that’s the three emotions that they can recognize. And other men are just completely disconnected whatsoever. There’s just almost no ability to recognize, articulate, or even describe what you feel.

So there’s kind of an awareness sometimes of like, yeah, I think I feel happy or yeah, I think I feel sad, but there’s no ability to describe what that’s like from a physiological standpoint. So being able to say, oh yeah, when I get sad, I feel like something’s squeezing in my diaphragm and all of a sudden it’s like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed and all of a sudden tears are coming out of my eyes. Or yeah, when I get angry, it feels like this big ball of fire, like the sun gets turned on in my chest and all of a sudden all of this energy is emanating, you know, down to my belly, out my arms, up into my head.

Usually most men, when they really sit with it, they can articulate what they’re feeling and where that feeling, that emotion is coming from. They can describe some of the thoughts that coincide with it, some of the sensations that coincide with it. And so alexithymia can be challenging because you don’t have access to the personal data of what you are feeling.

However, you will be acting and responding oftentimes from that emotion. So this is kind of the tricky thing with alexithymia. For a lot of guys, they’re unaware of what they’re feeling, they’re not able to describe what they’re feeling.

But if you’re in a conversation with them and they start to get a little agitated or a little elevated or a little closed down, they will respond from that anger or that grief or whatever it is, but they won’t be able to describe or understand it. So if you are somebody that struggles or thinks that you struggle with alexithymia, I would really encourage you to work with a professional. They will be able to help you slow down your process, connect to the body, be able to put some, sometimes some language around it.

But sometimes what I’ve found in working with men that have alexithymia is that it’s almost not necessary to get into the verbal of it. It’s more necessary to just connect the sensation of what you are feeling in your body. The last piece is derealization.

Oh, and alexithymia and derealization that I’m about to talk about are both oftentimes a byproduct of trauma, of PTSD, of having some pretty sometimes severe, not always severe, but sometimes severe adverse events that have happened in your life, whether that was acute or ongoing. So derealization is a feeling that your surroundings or your experience aren’t real. And this can be very jarring.

This can be very disconcerting and men that have severe depression or severe anxiety can have derealization. Oftentimes guys that have done a lot of drugs and maybe had a couple bad experiences will experience derealization and it can be wildly, wildly, wildly unnerving. It can really be a brutal experience.

And what I’ve found is that generally speaking, more men than women seem to struggle with derealization. My opinion on that is that we struggle, men struggle with derealization more than women because men, we as men are conditioned to disconnect from our emotions more and derealization is the ultimate disconnection. It’s like a form of disassociation, except you’re not checking out from your consciousness per se.

You’re not disconnecting from a conversation. It’s that reality itself kind of becomes two dimensional, opaque, flat, and you find yourself really questioning whether what you’re seeing, thinking, hearing, experiencing is real. And that can be brutal.

If you struggle with this, please reach out to somebody that knows how to work with it and go work with them immediately. Generally, again, this is a by-product of some type of PTSD, some type of trauma that has happened that is unresolved and the psyche is trying to work it out. Derealization is also something that can happen when your physical and emotional body is having such an intense experience that it’s almost like it tries to eject you, like your awareness or your consciousness, out of that moment.

You might be having such crippling and overwhelming anxiety, and hopefully you don’t mind me talking about this because for some people, even just listening to it can be activating, so I want to be mindful of that, but you might be experiencing really intense anxiety and when that’s not attended to, or I don’t want to say dealt with, but when it’s not attended to properly, what can happen is it can build to the point where derealization starts to take place. And so it can be a very extreme form of anxiety and of PTSD. So if you’re struggling with derealization, a couple of things can help.

If you are in a relationship, having a conversation with somebody that is in on the game of what’s happening inside of you, and generally what I found for a lot of guys is that when that derealization starts to happen, it’s usually because some really big amount of grief underneath the surface is trying to come up, almost like a water pressure, where you see those geysers that shoot water way up into the sky. Derealization is almost like there’s this pressure building underneath the surface of the psyche that a man’s not aware of, and all of this grief is building pressure and building pressure and building pressure, and it’s trying to come out, but it doesn’t have a vent out. And so what’s happening is he’s experiencing anxiety, anxiousness, worry, panic, frustration, paranoia, that kind of stuff, but he doesn’t realize that underneath that is this massive pressure of grief that’s trying to emerge.

And when you start to tell somebody what you’re experiencing and you let them in on the game, hey, I’m experiencing this, what can happen is that the dam can break. And if you trust and respect and feel safe with that person, then the grief has a place to come out. Very common in men that I’ve worked with that have had trauma in their childhood, have some form of PTSD, whether it’s from being in the military, that when they’re experiencing depersonalization or derealization, that grief has needed a place to come out, but he hasn’t allowed it to.

And so the psyche or the mind’s only way to deal with it is by checking out so fully and completely that it’s almost like you exit from reality, that you try and exit from the three-dimensional plane in which you exist. So talk to somebody, tell them what’s going on inside of you, share what you’re experiencing, and let yourself maybe start to feel and connect to what’s underneath the surface. For a lot of men that I’ve worked with, when that derealization happens and then they communicate to somebody that they trust, whether it’s a therapist, a psychologist, a coach, a wife, girlfriend, a best friend, a partner, a husband, a boyfriend, et cetera, and all of that emotion can come up, then the whole thing can settle back in.

So hopefully that gives you some context–I’m watching as a whole herd of turkeys, wild turkeys walk past in my backyard. I wish I could show them to you–But hopefully that lands with you. These three things are really big things that a lot of men deal with that I don’t think our modern therapeutic industry are supporting men with. If you’re one of the men that struggles with these things and you want to learn more about any of them or you follow me on Instagram, please send me a message, comment, and let me know how I can support you.

If there’s one of these that you want me to go deeper into, give you more tools and resources on, I would love to do so. All right, until next time, thank you very much for tuning in. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel.

Don’t forget to man it forward to somebody that you know might need to hear this. Until next time, Connor Beaton signing off.