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Men's Issues
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Male Depresion
Nov 1, 2005
We've been noticing a number of studies recently which have begun to show the depth of the problem of depression in men. Researchers are no venturing to say that, contrary to previous accepted knowledge, men - especially those in their 40s and 50s - may in fact be more prone to depression than women.
The latest finding is that men who slide down the social ladder during their lifetime take the blow much harder than women in the same position, and be more prone to depression. In fact though women were twice as likely to be downwardly mobile they generally avoided the depression and poor psychological wellbeing that researchers found in men in the same position.
Men who experienced a downward social shift were four times more likely to experience depression than men who improved their social status, whereas there was no marked difference in mental health between women who had moved up or down the social ladder.
In the study, researchers from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne used the occupation of the head of the household as the marker for social status, and surveyed men and women born in 1947 in Newcastle from childhood to age 50.
Their findings could be explained by the fact that men born in this era gained much of their self-esteem from their careers, whereas women found fulfilment from other social pursuits outside work, such as children and friendships. It's also possible that women are more emotionally resilient in this type of situation, say the researchers.
The study is published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Lead researcher, Dr Paul Tiffin said: "The Newcastle Thousand Families Study gave us an opportunity to try and understand more about how socioeconomic circumstances throughout life might be linked to mental well-being in middle age. With an increasing emphasis on the promotion of good health, findings such as these are likely to challenge those involved in health and social policy. Having robust mental health is just as important as good physical health - the two are often interdependent. Depression can lead to a vicious circle where poor mental health and lack of engagement with society becomes the norm for an individual.
Dr Tiffin added "Whilst we must be cautious in generalising our findings to other populations, our findings do suggest that it's important for governments and other agencies to consider the wider effect of mass redundancies and drastic economic changes. The tendency is to focus on the financial losses that workers and their families experience but this research shows that the psychological effects should equally be taken into account and acted upon."
Read more in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
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Low Body Image Affects More Men
May 11, 2004
TV images of muscular, bare-chested men lifting weights and endorsing after-shave leave men feeling depressed and unhappy with their muscularity, which may lead to steroid abuse and unhealthy, extreme exercising, University of Central Florida researchers have concluded.
While many studies have shown how images of thin, beautiful models affect women's self-esteem, a team led by UCF psychology professor Stacey Tantleff-Dunn are among the first to examine how "a culture of muscularity" affects the wellbeing of men.
Boys are exposed to the culture at an early age, when they play with muscular action figures, Tantleff-Dunn said. Male heroes in movies and video games often are "supersized," as are actors in many commercials for deodorant and exercising equipment.
"The level of muscularity and attractiveness that are idealized in the media often are not attainable for the average man," Tantleff-Dunn said. "Men see more of a discrepancy between how they want to look, or think they need to look, and the image they see in the mirror. Such discrepancies can cause the dissatisfaction and low self-esteem that lead to extreme and often unhealthy actions, such as eating disorders, exercising too much and steroid abuse."
Nearly 160 UCF students, whose average age was 21, were divided into two groups for the study. Both groups watched an old episode of "Family Feud" hosted by Richard Dawson, but they saw different, modern commercials during the game show. One group saw ads that featured primarily muscular, young and bare-chested men in commercials advertising products such as deodorant and cologne. Another group saw ads for financial, telephone and automobile companies that mainly featured men ages 30 and older wearing business or casual clothes at home or in a business setting.
Students who saw ads with muscular, bare-chested men reported feeling more depressed and less satisfied with their muscles, while the other students reported feeling much less depressed after watching the show. Previous studies on body image have focused on body parts such as the thighs and buttocks that are more of a concern to women than men, she said. "The key will be to help people develop realistic expectations about their appearance, as well as the appearance of others, and avoid buying into ideals that are impossible or unhealthy to attain," Tantleff-Dunn said.
Published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
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Unemployment Strikes a Blow on Men's Mental Health
February 18, 2004
We have been saying for some time that unemployment strikes men harder than it does women and the reasons stem from our hunter-gatherer past.
It's true that women typically have higher rates of unemployment than men, however the mental health of unemployed men tends to be worse than that of unemployed women has been confirmed by a recent study.
Unemployment had a higher impact on men's mental health than on women's, especially among married people. Other factors affecting the unemployed people's mental health included whether they received unemployment compensation and whether they had family responsibilities or not.
For married men, unemployment struck a harder blow to their mental health than those single, whereas for unemployed women, having children living at home tended to bolster their mental outlook in the face of losing a job.
We believe that the problem for men lies in the fact that the workplace is the modern substitute for the hunting band. It was within this group that men got their sense of purpose and formed their closest attachments. Expulsion from the band meant not only shame, but also real fear for a man's very survival. Men tend to form fewer relationships outside of work for this reason.
Men also need to feel that they are the providers (even if this was never really the case since the women in a hunter-gatherer band brought in most of the food). For a man loss of employment means loss of status. Other recent research has shown that "house husbands"--who are performing what they consider lower status work--are four times more likely to die of a heart attack that those who are employed.
Unemployment can also mean the loss of the family car, an essential mobility symbol. Without mobility a hunter can't hunt.
No wonder unemployed males become depressed and more prone to suicide!
Read more in the American Journal of Public Health
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How Loneliness and Health Risks of Older Men Go Unseen
April 2, 2003
Many older men risk their health through seeing a visit to the doctor as a sign
of weakness, whilst those who are divorced are most likely to indulge in heavy
drinking and smoking. Many admitted to postponing making an appointment with
the doctor until they are very sick, says the report, with potential longterm
adverse health consequences.
Divorced older men--a growing segment of the population--are
"significantly disadvantaged" when it comes to involvement in formal organisations,
or with family, friends and neighbours, according to the report. It calls for policy
makers to recognise their special needs.
Older men prefer not to frequent day centres and luncheon clubs because
they feel they are too heavily geared to the needs of older women. Little
is offered to interest men, says co-director of the study, Dr Kate Davidson of the
Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender, University of Surrey.
Groups aimed specifically at older people are seen by men as places for
people who have "given up." They avoid day centres dominated by older
women and regard
them as a last resort should they become incapacitated. Said Dr Davidson: "The
perception was that the only activities at day centres involved sitting
around, chatting or playing Bingo--the sort of thing 'old women' enjoy
doing. Efforts must be made to make these clubs more attractive to older men so that
they do not feel they are 'yielding up' their individuality or admitting
'defeat'. They
could, as happens in a few cases, offer wine and beer with lunch, a snooker
table or a computer club."
Co-director, Professor Sara Arber said: "Over recent years there have
been substantial advances in our understanding of the lives of older women,
but older
men have been largely neglected. This research has redressed the imbalance."
The researchers found that older working class men are less involved
in community and religious organisations and sports clubs but more
likely than middle class
men to belong to social clubs. Many who belonged to social groups
had done so for a long time and remained active in sport clubs or undertaking
useful community or voluntary work.
Dr Davidson said that men saw women as key to building and keeping
groups of friends and contacts and that these contracted when they
were left alone through
divorce, widowhood or simply because they never married.
Dr Davidson added: "The customary approach to health improvement has
been to target individuals, but less attention has been paid to
the broad picture including biological, social, cultural and economic factors that
shape the way men act."
Read more from the Economic & Social Research Council
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Men and Women See Failure Differently
February 10, 2003
Edward Hirt, a social psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington has spent the last 10 years conducting research on this aspect of social psychology that involves the term self-handicapping.
"Self-handicapping is defined as an individual's attempt to reduce a threat to esteem by actively seeking or creating factors that interfere with performance as a causal explanation for failure," Hirt explained. "The goals of self-handicapping are to disregard ability as the causal factor for a poor performance and to embrace ability as the causal factor for a success."
His current study of several hundred subjects concentrated on gender differences in how self-handicapping is perceived. "What we found is that women have less tolerance for self-handicapping by men or women. They routinely made more negative evaluations of the self-handicapping targets and were less willing than men to excuse self-handicapping even when alternative explanations for effort withdrawal, such as peer pressure, were viable. We found that women not only are more suspicious of people who blow things off or withdraw effort, but also are more likely to think the person is just generally lazy, unmotivated or lacking in self-control," he said.
Hirt believes these findings reflect a fundamental difference between men and women in what they value in performance settings. "Men were far more lenient in their attributions of self-handicapping targets than were women and less likely to ascribe negative motivations to individuals who engage in self-handicapping behavior. Women, however, have little respect for individuals who lack motivation and fail to put forth the effort in important performance settings," he said. He noted an interesting paradox: those most inclined to engage in
self-handicapping behavior are less likely to attribute that motive to others.
Hirt said researchers want to develop a better understanding of the sources of such gender differences in value orientation. "It may be that the sex differences we have observed are simply another manifestation of broad gender differences in personality," he said.
Read more in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
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Men Die Young, Even When They're Old
February 10, 2003
Young men are often risk takers, and their predilection for thrills and spills means that they are more likely to die than young women. But if you assume things even out in later life, think again. Even after the excesses of youth, simply being a man is bad for your health. A new study across 20 countries reveals for the first time just how much bigger the risk of premature death is for men than women, whatever their age.
In the US in 1998, for example, men up to the age of 50 were on average twice as likely as wwomen to keel over, and the risk remained greater even for those men who had made it to their eighties and beyond. Less surprisingly, the discrepancy in death rates between men and women was most extreme between the ages of 20 and 24, when three times as many men die as women.
"Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death," says Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Nesse says that the finding has important implications for public health. "If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer," he says. Nesse's colleague Daniel Kruger estimates that over 375,000 lives would be saved in a single year in the US if men's risk of dying was as low as women's.
The US data is backed by death rates in countries including Ireland, Australia, Russia, Singapore and El Salvador. Nesse and Kruger found that everywhere they looked, it's more perilous to be male. In Colombia for example, men in their early twenties are five times as likely to die as women of the same age. Even more surprisingly, the pattern holds for every major cause of death, from car crashes to heart disease to homicide. For external causes of death, such as accidents, the difference between the sexes is greatest for young adults. But
the second largest disparity between men and women in the US occurs when they reach their sixties. At that point in their life, men are 1.68 times as likely to die as women, mainly due to disease.
The gender gap has widened dramatically in recent years, but it has been on the rise since the 1940s, at least in the US, France, Japan and Sweden, where historical figures are available.
The researchers suggest a number of factors that could be to blame for the trend. Population growth and globetrotting have led to a rise in infectious diseases. And improvements in public health and medicine may have benefitted women more than men: for instance, far fewer women now die at a relatively young age during childbirth. Technological advances may have played a part, too, by supplying men with more powerful guns and ever faster cars.
Nesse and Kruger say that sexual selection could also partly explain some of the differences. Men generally invest less in their children than women do, and as a result may compete more vigorously with each other for potential mates. This rivalry could be what drives them to take greater risks, with the result that men have evolved greater reproductive success at the expense of longevity. The same may be true for chimpanzees and even fruit flies, says Nesse.
Read more in New Scientist
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Sheep Study Raises Questions About Sexuality
November 12, 2002
US scientists claim to have found evidence that brain structure influences sexual preference in sheep. They say a region of the brain involved in sexual behavior is different in "gay" rams, which prefer to mate with other males.
Similar results have been found in humans, according to researchers at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland. The part of the brain studied is an area of the hypothalamus involved in mating behavior, the preoptic hypothalamus. In humans and some other animals it is about twice as large in males compared with females and contains twice the number of cells. Its function in behavior is not fully known.
Researchers studied sheep in an attempt to understand the biological basis of sexual behaviors. They say previous studies have shown that between six and 10% of rams are attracted to males rather than females. They analyzed the brain structures of 17 rams, nine of which preferred to mate with males, and 10 ewes.
Research focused on a group of brain cells in the preoptic hypothalamus called the sexually dimorphic nucleus. "Interestingly, this bundle of neurons is smaller in ewes and in rams with same-sex preferences than it is in rams that prefer ewes," said lead researcher Dr Kay Larkin.
"We also determined that the volume of the sexually dimorphic area is approximately the same in rams that prefer rams as it is in ewes."
The researchers believe sheep could help provide clues about human sexuality.
Professor Charles Roselli said: "While we realize that sexuality is more complex in humans than reproductive behaviors in sheep, this model will help illuminate the basic principles that apply to all mammals, and may be helpful in understanding the biology of human behaviors as well."
The question is why are the brains of gay rams different from those of straight rams? We know that in the human brain experiential factors such as stress, abuse and trauma can radically alter the shape of a young brain. It is also true that almost all gay people that have come to see Alicia and I in our practices have been the victims of sexual and/or other abuse. I would want to know the background of these rams -- what trauma have they experienced or witnessed? BM
Read more in BBC News
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Male Biological Clock Is Ticking
October 22, 2002
The researchers, from the University of Washington in Seattle, found that damage to the genetic material containing sperm cells increases with age. Unlike most other cells in the body, sperm cells are unable to repair this damage.
In addition, the researchers found that as a man gets older he loses his natural ability to weed out unhealthy sperm cells through a process known as apoptosis. This means that there is a greater chance that a damaged sperm cell will successfully fertilise the female egg. This could mean that the risk of miscarriage is increased or, at the other end of the scale, that children have a greater chance of developing mild abnormalities such as uneven teeth, or asymmetrical limbs. Lead researcher Dr Narendra Singh told the BBC: "We found there is a significant change by the age of 35."
Dr Singh's team examined sperm quality in 60 men aged between 22 and 60. All had healthy sperm counts. The researchers found that men aged 35 and older had higher concentrations of sperm with broken strands of DNA, and that the damage was greater. In general, older men's sperm was less active so they had less chance of fertilising an egg.
A recent study found that male infertility was just as likely as female infertility to prevent couples from having a family. The proportion of British men aged over 40 becoming fathers increased by half in the 1990s. In 1999 one in 10 children was born to a father aged over 40. It is known that a healthy lifestyle can have a positive effect on male fertility.
Read more in BBC News
Read more in Psychport
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Being Single Worse for Your Health Than Smoking
September 4, 2002
The health benefits of being married are so large that single men are at greater risk of dying than smokers, says a study. The study looked at comparative risks over a seven year period -- but experts warned that the lifetime risks of smoking were much higher.
Scientists have frequently found that married men and women tend to be in better health than their single counterparts. This is partly because of the "social support" of having a wife or husband -- and perhaps because both single men and women have a worse lifestyle -- and no-one to look out for their well being.
However, the latest study, by researchers at the University of Warwick, looked at thousands of records from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Retirement Survey. It found that, even when the effects of smoking, drinking and other poor lifestyles were taken into account, married men had a much lower risk of death.
Over a seven year period, the married male had a 9% lower risk of dying compared with an unmarried one. When smoking and drinking in this group was taken into account, the benefit was reduced to 6.1%. The effect was less for women -- reducing the risk of mortality by 2.9%.
Professor Andrew Oswald, who led the research, suggested that male smokers should get wed as soon as possible to counteract the risk. He said: "Forget cash. It is as clear as day from the data that marriage, rather than money, is what keeps people alive. It makes perfect sense to ask how a ring of gold can possibly do this. But the honest answer is, that we don't know."
Read more in BBC News
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Studies Often Ignore Domestic Violence Committed by Women
It's not only men who commit domestic violence, yet scientific studies rarely look at female-to-male violence, according to two letters in this week's BMJ. Responding to a recent editorial on domestic violence, Dr Mark Horner argues that the clear implication is that men are the oppressors and women suffer. Sadly this is often true, but it is far from being the whole picture, he writes. According to the 1996 British crime survey on the extent of domestic violence in England and Wales, 4.2% of women and 4.2% of men said that they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner in the past year. Indeed, when one considers that most violence against children is committed by women, in terms of gender it is women who are most likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence, says the author. Why is domestic violence so often portrayed in such a partisan and unscientific way? The justification for this slant in the domestic violence literature has been that female victims vastly outnumber male victims, writes Dr Chris Carlsten in an accompanying letter. Many data however suggest otherwise. For example, one study found that 86% of marital aggression was reported as reciprocal between husbands and wives. Another found that female-to-male violence was reported to be higher than male-to-female. Such reporting bias ignores many thousands of male victims and alienates those who demand a more balanced presentation, says the author. "Let's keep working to get better data, but let's recognize the bi-gender nature of this societal ill," he concludes.
Read more in the British Medical Journal
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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