‘It feels like a badge of dishonor’: How to overcome the stigma surrounding men’s mental health

JOANNA HAYES [email protected] Jun 30, 2023 Updated 13 hrs ago

This article is a repost which originally appeared on Post Register

Edited for content. The opinions expressed in this article may not reflect the opinions of this site’s editors, staff or members.

Key Points

‧ Men often find it difficult to discuss mental health issues.

‧ Men make up to 80% of suicides.

‧ Everyone struggles with something.  Talking about it can go a long way towards helping.

Five years ago, Charles Hale walked down Park Avenue, having finally mustered the courage to seek help out of homelessness.

Hale looked up and saw the Idaho Falls Rescue Mission sign. His heart beating uncontrollably. His shame hanging over his head. He couldn’t carry the burden of addiction any longer.

What were the people at the Rescue Mission going to tell him? What were they going to think of him? Hale never thought he would find real help in Idaho Falls, a town full of strangers.

He took a deep breath and opened the mission’s front door. He had nothing with him. Hale sat down at the front desk and explained that he needed a safe place to sleep. He didn’t want to spend another night on the street. He had been without shelter for five years, spending cold nights in Phoenix, Spokane, Seattle and, now, Idaho Falls.

“You know how they say the grass isn’t any greener?” Hale said. “Well the streets aren’t any blacker. It didn’t matter where I went.”

After meeting with a volunteer at the Rescue Mission for a few minutes, Hale started to wonder if the Idaho Falls streets might be less black. He might get off of them this time around.

The volunteer asked Hale if he could pass a urinalysis, as the Rescue Mission requires their guests to be sober upon admission and throughout their stay.

Hale couldn’t. He had been struggling with addiction his entire bout with homelessness. The Rescue Mission sent him to the Behavioral Health Crisis Center while he got sober.

But Hale knew he didn’t want to stay at the crisis center. There was something different about the Rescue Mission. They smiled when he entered. He felt his heart beat slower. His shame lifted. The Rescue Mission would help him carry the burden.

“I had become jaded from seeing the world (on the streets),” Hale said. “My breakthrough moment was when I walked through those doors and saw someone with a smile. It broke me.”

Hale never thought he would end up homeless. No one does. His family was close. They went to church every Sunday. He got a bachelor’s degree in information technology and a master’s degree in business.

Hale climbed the corporate ladder in Phoenix for 15 years. He married a lovely woman and had three beautiful boys. And then his mental health took a turn for the worse. He lost his father and fell into a deep reliance on alcohol and drugs.

“It was three strikes,” Hale said. “I lost my father, then my career and then my wife and three kids.”

For five years, Hale struggled under the weight of grief and addiction.

“It feels like you’re wearing a placard around your neck saying ‘addict’ or ‘homeless.’ You don’t need people to tell you that you are less than. You already feel that,” Hale said.

Hale said many men find it difficult to open up about their struggles, especially when it comes to mental health.

“It feels like a badge of dishonor,” Hale said.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women. Men make up 50% of the United States population but 80% of the suicides.

Kade Anderson, a psychiatrist with Ascend Mental Health Center in Idaho Falls, said the reason for that is layered. Anderson said men tend to use a more “final method,” such as firearms, when attempting suicide.

However, Anderson believes that the stigma surrounding men’s mental health also contributes to that statistic.

“Men can be afraid to admit weakness,” Anderson said. “They don’t want to talk about it. They want to do it all on their own.”

He said many people aren’t ashamed of other health struggles they have, but when it comes to mental health, they feel less than if they admit vulnerabilities. One way Anderson tries to combat stigma surrounding men’s mental health is through his own vulnerabilities.

“I tell my patients that I struggle with mental health, too.” Anderson said. “I have had to ask for help. I have zero shame. I think that helps them open up.”

Anderson said the best thing people can do is to be honest. Talk about wins. Talk about losses. Talk about the highs, and talk about the lows. He said the more open people are about their struggles, the more one realizes that everyone struggles with something.

Following Anderson’s advice is what brought Hale out of his cycle of addiction and struggles with depression. Hale knew he had to be honest about his situation in order to overcome it.

The Rescue Mission was different from any other safe house Hale had been to, and he had been to a lot. Safe houses focused on mental, physical and emotional health. But the Rescue Mission added spiritual health into the equation.

Hale found both “law and grace” while staying at the Rescue Mission. The workers were caring and loving, but they didn’t enable anyone, Hale said.

Hale joined the Rescue Mission’s recovery program. The seven-month course helped him find a job and permanent housing. He also found a mentor from a local church.

Today, Hale is the mission’s director of operations. He uses his story to help the men there overcome their battle with mental health.

He mentioned that over the past few months, he has seen men walk into the shelter who seemed to be struggling with their mental health, but they weren’t talking about it.

“(Men) can be concerned with stigma and they can’t make that connection. It’s heart-breaking,” Hale said. “Someone has told them they are suffering and it’s too hard to accept. They think ‘If I’m labeled this, how am I going to be successful?’”

Everyone struggles with something, he said, it’s just whether they talk about it.

“We have all experienced a mental health crisis in our lives. Whether it’s you or someone you know,” Hale said.

June was Men’s Mental Health Month. If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, call or text 988 to reach the suicide hotline. You can also reach out to Ascend Mental Health Center at 208-419-3002 or the Behavioral Health Crisis Center at 208-522-0727.

Psychedelics Show Promise in Treating Mental Illness: Depression, Anxiety, Addiction, and PTSD

One in five U.S. adults will experience a mental illness in their lifetime, according to the National Alliance of Mental Health. But standard treatments can be slow to work and cause side effects.

To find better solutions, a Virginia Tech researcher has joined a renaissance of research on a long-banned class of drugs that could combat several forms of mental illness and, in mice, have achieved long-lasting results from just one dose.

This article is a repost which originally appeared on SciTechDaily 
VIRGINIA TECH - NOVEMBER 27, 2021
Edited for content and readability - Images sourced from Pexels 
Study: DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109836

Using a process his lab developed in 2015, Chang Lu, the Fred W. Bull Professor of Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering, is helping his Virginia Commonwealth University collaborators study the epigenomic effects of psychedelics.

Their findings give insight into how psychedelic substances like psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, and similar drugs may relieve symptoms of addiction, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The drugs appear to work faster and last longer than current medications — all with fewer side effects.

The project hinged on Lu’s genomic analysis. His process allows researchers to use very small samples of tissue, down to hundreds to thousands of cells, and draw meaningful conclusions from them. (https://zegaapparel.com) Older processes require much larger sample sizes, so Lu’s approach enables the studies using just a small quantity of material from a specific region of a mouse brain.

And looking at the effects of psychedelics on brain tissues is especially important.

Researchers can do human clinical trials with the substances, taking blood and urine samples and observing behaviors, Lu said. “But the thing is, the behavioral data will tell you the result, but it doesn’t tell you why it works in a certain way,” he said.

But looking at molecular changes in animal models, such as the brains of mice, allows scientists to peer into what Lu calls the black box of neuroscience to understand the biological processes at work. While the brains of mice are very different from human brains, Lu said there are enough similarities to make valid comparisons between the two.

VCU pharmacologist Javier González-Maeso has made a career of studying psychedelics, which had been banned after recreational use of the drugs was popularized in the 1960s. But in recent years, regulators have begun allowing research on the drugs to proceed.

In work by other researchers, primarily on psilocybin, a substance found in more than 200 species of fungi, González-Maeso said psychedelics have shown promise in alleviating major depression and anxiety disorders. “They induce profound effects in perception,” he said. “But I was interested in how these drugs actually induce behavioral effects in mice.”

To explore the genomic basis of those effects, he teamed up with Lu.

In the joint Virginia Tech – VCU study, González-Maeso’s team used 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, or DOI, a drug similar to LSD, administering it to mice that had been trained to fear certain triggers. Lu’s lab then analyzed brain samples for changes in the epigenome and the gene expression. They discovered that the epigenomic variations were generally more long-lasting than the changes in gene expression, thus more likely to link with the long-term effects of a psychedelic.

After one dose of DOI, the mice that had reacted to fear triggers no longer responded to them with anxious behaviors. Their brains also showed effects, even after the substance was no longer detectable in the tissues, Lu said. The findings were published in the October issue of Cell Reports.

It’s a hopeful development for those who suffer from mental illness and the people who love them. In fact, it wasn’t just the science that drew Lu to the project.

For him, it’s also personal.

“My older brother has had schizophrenia for the last 30 years, basically. So I’ve always been intrigued by mental health,” Lu said. “And then once I found that our approach can be applied to look at processes like that — that’s why I decided to do research in the field of brain neuroscience.”

González-Maeso said research on psychedelics is still in its early stages, and there’s much work to be done before treatments derived from them could be widely available.