Many anxious men (and women) aren't suffering from an anxiety disorder. Their anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to the life they are living. I'm fine with therapy, meditation, and medication as long as they aren't used as tools to make it bearable to stay in a bad situation.
The article makes it clear that a feeling of anxiety at certain times is completely normal; it is when that anxiety is affects your daily life, causing you distress, or leads to depression or harm should it be concidered an anxiety disorder.
The article notes that men can react to or present with anxiety differently; and that representation is ignored, leading to a reduction in their quality of life. Dimissing it, as you have, is exactly what prevents men from receiving mental health support and society, at large, from recognising mental health issues in men.
If you are chronically stressed because you are working a terrible job, have overwhelming family obligations, etc., that doesn’t necessarily mean you have an “anxiety disorder”.
It might instead be that your anxiety is a perfectly natural response to bad circumstances. To fix the problem it would be better to address the causes of the stress instead of trying to just treat symptoms.
At a societal scale, it would be better to e.g. improve worker protection laws, expand the social safety net, subsidize childcare for working parents, crack down on fraudulent business practices, allow people to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy, make sure skilled immigrant workers can switch employers without losing their immigration status, work to reduce domestic violence, reform the criminal justice system, etc. instead of just expanding access to anxiolytic medication or pretending that therapy alone can solve all problems.
For an individual, the proper response might be to quit a job, start saying “no” to demands to work overtime, break up with an abusive partner, sit down and have a frank conversation with overly demanding parents, declare bankruptcy, take a leave of absence from college, let someone else take over maintaining the open source project, ...
> To fix the problem it would be better to address the causes of the stress instead of trying to just treat symptoms.
The effect of depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental illnesses is that they prevent you from taking steps to address the addressable issues in your life. To start exercising while depressed, to start socializing while suffering from anxiety, etc., are some of the hardest things to do. That’s why medication is typically paired with counseling - the medication prepares you to take the steps the counseling guides you into taking.
To put it another way, anxiety disorders (and depression, and ADHD, and more) take away agency. The purpose of medication is to reintroduce agency. The medication (for most people) won’t fix their problems, but it will help them fix them.
do you think that, in general, medication is successful in improving the agency of it's users?
i worry that medication harbors a reliance on drugs, and facilitates growth of a society in which drug-use is necessary to participate "normally".
if someone with ADD/ADHD has an opportunity to increase their agency, do you think that would increase their quality of life? the parent commenter suggested that mental illness (in the case of depression) might be the result of someone with healthy brain chemistry in a bad environment. but do you think that someone with healthy brain chemistry can demonstrate an attention disorder as a result of their environment, and would be more able to improve their environment through medication?
> i worry that medication harbors a reliance on drugs
It can also get you out of bed when nothing else does. Or prevent you from killing yourself when you otherwise would have. Or give you a push to take small steps to get your life together. All of these effects are valuable despite efficacy being far from 100%, there being side effects and issues with reliance.
Of course lowering your stress level is always a valid response, if possible.
But it is possible to handle even very stressful situations without damaging yourself with anxiety and depression. These are skills you can build up, and are very useful to have.
> ...it is when that anxiety is affects your daily life, causing you distress, or leads to depression or harm should it be concidered an anxiety disorder.
But what if your lifestyle is the cause of that anxiety / depression? I think that's what the commenter was trying to say.
Imagine working long hours in a job you hate to barely live pay check to pay check, and on top of that you're in a poor relationship. Every minute of every day is worrying about paying your next bill. You have no savings and are in debt. You haven't been on vacation in 15+ years and every time you enter your apartment, it's uncomfortable because you either fight with your partner or you ignore each other, but you stay together because you can't afford to live on your own.
On top of that your diet is garbage because poor nutritional foods are usually cheaper than healthy foods unless you're a master cook, but who has the time or energy for that with the above life style.
The above is pretty common for a lot of people. Maybe not everything happens to everyone at once, but all it takes is to be in a shitty work situation for little pay (very common) and that's enough to train your brain into thinking life is an un-escapable torture chamber.
You'd have to be crazy not to always be on edge and depressed if that was your life day in and day out.
Fortunately I'm not talking from personal experience from all of the above but I do like psychology and a number of respectful psychologists are in agreement that you can get in a very bad mental state from your life style and a lot of people have made drastic mental health improvements by removing the things that cause them daily stress.
The GP's comment merely says that your environment can have a huge detrimental impact on your mental health. In no way is that dismissive of seeking help. They even applaud the use of the 'normal' tools.
In fact, the scenario that you describe of a person exhibiting symptoms of anxiety disorder because every day is distressing is pretty much exactly the same scenario the GP is saying about a life-setup that is causing you harm.
I don't believe I meant what you think I meant. I intended to make a comment about our society creating unnecessary anxiety. I hope we look at the cause of the anxiety instead of just treating the symptoms.
I do want people to see mental health professionals if they are suffering. I fear that option isn't available to many people that need the help, so I'd like to see a societal change in the pressures we put on each other and the ways we live our lives.
Well said! I frequently have anxious feelings in my day-to-day life. If I were to share that with my peers I think they might be surprised to hear it because I come across as solid, well-grounded person. I have learned to deal with these feelings. I have learned to deal with difficult situations -- but some times I can't and I fumble. That's OK.
I wonder, at what point does such anxiety justify medication? Is there a measurable way of defining this disorder? (forgive my ignorance, I am genuinely curious). There are certainly cases where anxiety is clearly a disorder, but without a doubt it there are many cases where it is used as an excuse or a defensive mechanism, to avoid difficult situations or avoid one's own inadequacies. This kind of behavior is not good. They will refuse to challenge themselves by clutching to their excuse.
First off, sometimes life circumstances are not changeable. Second off, any therapist worth anything will help you figure out what changes you could make in your life that would help your mental health. Third off, getting relief from some severity of symptoms, through any means, does not keep one from using the information in those symptoms.
Well said. Anxiety is sometimes a signal that there's an underlying imbalance in your life. Just like you start tearing up when you feel sad. Crying isn't bad in that scenario.
Anxiety works similarly. You gotta start asking yourself, why am I feeling anxious? Where could my life be out of balance?
What if the anxiety seems to come from a place of the entire human society being out of balance? I pretty much think if you're not feeling anxious, you're not paying attention.
Do you think that society is more out of balance now than it was 30, 50, 70, or 100 years ago?
If so, I’ll be glib and say you haven’t paid enough attention to history :-)
To pick a random anecdote, in the past senators have been physically attacked and maimed by their colleagues on the senate floor, i.e. while at work.
Campaigns were dirtier than they are now. Politicians would accuse each other of being murderers and even cannibals. (e.g. look up the coffin bills and Andrew Jackson.)
The mainstream media printed many things that would be unacceptable today. (Jon Stewart had a good bit about this a long time ago.)
Not to mention the total war involving multiple continents that happened a couple times in the last century...
Not to say we should think that stuff will never happen again. It absolutely could. But depending on your viewpoint we’ve always been on the brink of collapse, or on the brink of greatness, etc.
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Also, I don't believe that reading or watching news counts as "paying attention", especially if you're not in the position to take any action as a result (i.e. you don't work in politics, policy, etc.).
It's generally a very passive activity. The time would be better spent observing what's going on in your town/city rather than "the world". Or even just doing something constructive in your area of expertise, e.g. writing free software, etc.
Standards are higher now. We're more aware of more potential emotional triggers.
I've observed that with the Internet increasing our potential access to information by > 1000x, the adaptive emotional response to any given piece of information needs to be toned down by a factor of 1000x to maintain emotional stability. Wouldn't make me very popular at parties to say that the proper emotional response to kids getting murdered at a festival is to shrug your shoulders and say "By the numbers, your odds of getting killed in a mass shooting are still one in a million, which is less than when we were kids", but that's both a true and a rational statement to make.
Personally, I find it a little grotesque how many people share in these poor parent's horrifying tragedy. So much airtime and public eyes watching the absolute worst day of your life as a parent on national television and all over the internet. It's pretty horrible all around yet uniquely American.
What I think is worse is the contrast of how flippant people are with flu shots. We rightfully scorn anti-vaxxers, yet people aren't lining up to get their flu shot every year. 50000 people died from the flu in the U.S. alone last year. That's sixteen 9/11s, and almost as many U.S. soldiers were killed in action in the entire Vietnam war. In one flu season.
There's nothing political about the flu, nothing to be outraged about (except if you are me), no votes or money to be made by people reading and sharing it's coverage, and therefore it is buried into the footnotes far below the more profitable ad spend. Another statistic, but something that everyone could actually do something about if they walked into a CVS and got their fucking free shot.
You might like the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari. The premise of the book, from what I can remember, is a mix between yours and GP's comment. It's basically that things are being over-prescribed, such as depression if you haven't stopped grieving after a year from the death of a loved one, as well as it happening more because our basic human structures are crumbling (namely, community). I definitely want to do a reread of it and pursue some of his leads more.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this book, I was just about to reply with it myself. I'd summarize the core premise as anxiety and depression, while some people are more naturally predisposed to them, aren't things that "just happen", and it's not your brain suddenly misfiring for no reason.
Our culture has become increasingly individualized and isolated, in contrast to millions of years of evolutionary selection for tribal behavior in the great apes. Anxiety is a natural response to being separated from your tribe, since it increases your risk exposure to many things. It's not enough to just have colleagues or acquaintances, but people who actually know and care about you and will notice if you're missing or if something is wrong.
A fantastic book. I borrowed it from the library, but I think I'm going to buy my own copy.
