Lifting the Weight: Understanding Depression in Men, Its Causes and Solutions
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0275993728
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Depression in men often goes undiagnosed or improperly treated because of unique qualities that make it different from depression in women. In this volume, Dr. Kantor explains that depression in men is not strictly the product of major life events; it also regularly appears in response to minor troubling issues that often go entirely overlooked by others or, if recognized at all, are downplayed. In this jargon-free text, Kantor explains how many men are able to navigate the big stresses successfully only to succumb to the little ones. And he challenges the current widespread tendency now viewing depression in men as a strictly biological event to be treated first and foremost with pharmaceuticals.
Psychiatrist Martin Kantor takes us into his treatment rooms and daily experience to show the signs and causes of depression in men, and how they do not display the disorder most often in the way we typically associate with depression. Many men who feel depressed deny it by shifting into hypomania. Trying to hide, reject or downplay the feeling, they may become excessively elated, have a decreased need for sleep, find their thoughts racing and their sexual desire fueled out of control. Where there was, initially with depression, a withdrawal and a desire to weep, then enters attention-seeking behavior, clowning and flighty energy, explains Kantor. That makes the depression far more difficult for laypeople and professionals―even for the men themselves―to recognize and deal with. That is unfortunate because a small amount of medical attention and personal affection can work wonders, rechanneling the man into a life of happiness he might never have known, and a level of achievement he might never othewise have attained, says Kantor
Long thought to be a feminine disorder connected to hormones and the premenstrual syndrome, depression actually strikes millions of men each year. With absorbing vignettes, and insights into a faulty culture that urges men to always have a stiff upper lip and shun medical attention, Dr. Kantor shows the unique ways in which depression is very much a men's disorder. And he helps us understand what we can do to treat it, to help ourselves and the men we care about recover.
one grieving man said, “While I look like an old man left to die in a nursing home, I feel like a baby abandoned to wither in an orphanage.” This, a penultimate phase, like a climax of fever, involves hitting bottom. But just when it appears to be the darkest time of all, dawn breaks and ushers in the final, or fourth, phase of grief. Step four involves the beginning of improvement. Feeling blue begins to wane, hypomanic denial subsides, good judgment prevails, and remission, well under way,
dessert served at the very fashionably late hour of 1:00 A.M., was without a doubt the highlight of his entire life. Some are overeating in response to the depressive delusional belief that any weight loss signifies cancer or HIV—and their gaining weight means that they are out of the woods and not about to die. Sometimes their overeating is the product of the increased appetite that signals a recovery from deep depression as they get a rush of relief over how their burdens have finally lifted.
feeling is, however, typically shot through with irritability, which often appears when they feel or are actually thwarted even in some minor way. Now flashes of anger take over and 64 Description they become explosively nasty and personally hurtful. As I was talking to a man who was rushing about happily on his way to take a train that didn’t exist, my dog jumped up on him and licked his face. His expansive, euphoric mood was temporarily interrupted by an anger flash: “You fool, how could
Making the Diagnosis 11 CLASSIFYING DEPRESSION Depression can be profitably viewed as a specific symptom, as a disorder characterized by a constellation of symptoms, or as a syndrome where the identified constellation of symptoms is a destination reached by many roads. The constellation depression has a number of subclassifications, each of which in turn has somewhat indistinct boundaries. Dysthymia (Dysthymic Disorder) Dysthymia is a mild form of depression. It tends to be more long-lived and
him to deny feeling impoverished, allowing him to create a rosy out of a bleak present. Therefore, it is not so surprising after all that a depressed millionaire can heist a gewgaw from a Dollar Store to give himself a little gift, or a depressed poor man can gamble to excess just to get complimentary services from the casino—with both attempting to reverse the ravages of inner disapproval by turning their negative self-view around with small and symbolic compensatory gifts and personal victories