David Van Nuys, Ph.D., aka “Dr. Dave” interviews Jed Diamond, Ph.D.

(transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com by Susan Argyelan)
 
Excerpt:  The third major thing that we found was that depression and irritability are related:  21% of the men said that they were depressed often or almost always – high  levels of depression, and that we’re actually seeing this irritability and anger rather than  being an indication that they’re just crotchety old men, or even irritable old men, is that there’s often, this is the way that men experience depression. 

Different from women; women often will experience depression as sadness, as crying, as feeling just unhappy with life and unhappy with the world. 

The way that men often express their depression as I describe it, we act it out.   

Introduction:     That was my guest, Dr. Jed Diamond. 

Jed Diamond, Ph.D., has been a licensed psychotherapist for over 43 years and is the author of seven books, including the internationally bestselling Male Menopause and Surviving Male Menopause, that has thus far been translated into 32 foreign languages, and the recently released The Irritable Male Syndrome:  Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression, which is also developing a worldwide readership. 

Jed is Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well.  Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. 

Since its inception in 1992, Jed has been on the Board of Advisors of the Men's Health Network.  He’s also a member of the International Society for the Study of the Aging Male and serves as a member of the International Scientific Board of the World Congress on Men’s Health. 

Now, here’s the interview. 

Dr. Dave:     Dr. Jed Diamond, welcome to Shrink Rap Radio.  

Jed Diamond:  Glad to be with you. 

Dr. Dave:   Your first book was titled Male Menopause, and your more recent one is on what you call Irritable Male Syndrome.  And I have to say, I read the latter with some trepidation, wondering to what extent I might find myself on every page. (laughs)  

Diamond:  I think that’s the experience many, many of us have.  I’ve found that to be true after doing the research for Male Menopause and finding out how much irritability and anger, irritation there was in men, particularly at midlife.  I found that this is an area that really touched the lives of a whole lot of men, as well as the women that interact with us, love us, and live with us. 

Dr. Dave:     Yeah, I’m not sure any of us, (laughs) I don’t know if any of us escape.  It’s kind of like what they call – when I taught Abnormal Psychology, I know – there’s always that issue of, I think it’s called “medical student syndrome” - where when people are going through medical school, they feel like they have all the symptoms of all the diseases they study. 

Diamond:  Right. 

Dr. Dave:     Well, let’s start with the notion of male menopause.  We know that women go through hormonal changes that lead to very observable physiological changes.  Are you saying that men go through similar hormonal changes?  Or are you speaking more metaphorically? 

Diamond:  We used to think that this was more of a metaphorical, you know... men have a midlife crisis or go through something that might be like what women go through.  But what we found increasingly with the research that’s been going on throughout the world over the last 25 years or so is that men, like women, have a hormonally based change of life that has to do with dropping hormonal levels – particularly testosterone – that begins to happen for some men as early as 35; for others, as late as 65. 

But this hormonal change really affects men in similar ways than it does with women.  And so, although the term itself, “male menopause,” is not technically accurate – men don’t have a menstrual cycle, so obviously, they don’t stop having one – and yet the hormonally based changes that affect our psychological state, our emotional state, our sexuality really is similar enough to what I think women go through that the term has caught on, and it really has been recognized now throughout the world.  

Dr. Dave:     Wow.  And women, I know, sometimes treat symptoms by taking some hormones.  Are there – I know you’re not a physician – but are there any hormones or drugs or medical treatments that men can resort to? 

Diamond:  Well, I generally recommend for men and women that they start with things that we know affect our hormones, our emotions – you know, our diet, exercise, the level of stress in our lives, how we’re interacting in our personal and interpersonal relationships. 

But we also find that for some men, as true for women, hormonal changes are so dramatic – in some cases, the effects so serious – that hormone restoration is something that men are considering in the same way that women have been doing for years.  And for men, testosterone is the main hormone that men often lose at this age. 

And a significant number of men are going to their doctors and getting, if they need it, testosterone restoration to bring their hormone levels back up to a level that they were experiencing when their sexuality was at a younger age; the way their body felt was when they were in their 20s and 30s. 

And for many men, they’re finding this a very important alternative to just going on, business as usual – feeling their sexuality, their vitality, their energy level just drifting away.

Dr. Dave:     Fascinating.  Now, your most recent book is titled Irritable Male Syndrome, and perhaps we should start out by having you define Irritable Male Syndrome, or what you abbreviate as IMS.   

Diamond:  Right.  Well, just to give you a little background on this, what I found when I was doing the research for male menopause was that although many clinicians were focused on sexual symptoms – male sexual dysfunction, erectile dysfunction, loss of sexual desire – we were seeing these in our study sample, but we were also seeing a real high level of irritability and anger.

And so this really led to my further research that we cited in the book, Irritable Male Syndrome. 

In that, I defined Irritable Male Syndrome as a state of hypersensitivity, anxiety, frustration, and anger that occurs in males and is associated with biochemical changes, hormonal fluctuations, stress, and loss of male identity. 

So that encompasses, in a short sentence, a whole lot of both symptoms and causes that our research that we were conducting on nearly 30,000 males throughout the world allowed us an insight into what’s going on with men throughout our lives, and particularly at midlife. 

Dr. Dave:     Well, you’ve just spoken to two of the questions that I had here (laughs), which is to ask you what you meant when you said IMS is a multidimensional problem. 

But you just went through it.  You point out that it’s hormonal, it’s physical, psychological, emotional, interpersonal, economic, social, sexual, and spiritual, and then I was going to ask you about the four core symptoms. 

And I think you just mentioned those as hypersensitivity, anxiety, frustration, and anger. 

Diamond:  Right. 

Dr. Dave:  Yeah.  One of the things I really appreciate about your book is that you are very open about your own story, which, I guess, is how you got into exploring these issues in the first place.  And you weave various elements of your story throughout the book.  Perhaps you can share some of that background now. 

Diamond:  Well, yeah, I’ve been a psychotherapist and worked with men and the women that loved them really going on 43 years now.  And as is true for many psychotherapists in the field, we’re certainly not immune to the problems that we try to address in others. 

And I was finding, as my wife was going through menopause and she was experiencing various symptoms of loss of sexual desire and irritability and anger, I focused on her, you know. 

If only she could get her life together and get her symptoms under control, things would improve.  And what I found, to my dismay, was as things got better for her, I found that a lot of the symptoms that I was seeing in her were there in me.  I say I found it out, but really, she pointed it out to me. 

And over many, many months, I had to admit that this was true for me.  And I have a colleague, Kay Redfield Jamison, who is one of the world’s experts on depression and bipolar illness, she wrote in her book a little sentence that just really struck home for me. 

She said as she was experiencing some of these symptoms, she said, “You’re irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding, and no reassurance is ever enough.  You’re frightened and you’re frightening.  And you’re not at all like yourself, but you will be soon.  But you know you won’t.” 

I read that; I said, “Wow!  She’s talking about me!”  And as I then began to, you know, research this in more depth, I found that there were thousands, millions of men throughout the world that were going through these changes that come across as angry and blaming and irritable. 

And what they really are, at core, are these symptoms that relate to this multidimensional change of life that so many of us are going through.

~ ~ ~

Listen to podcast and read rest of transcript:
Shrink Rap Radio #165, July 25, 2008

Book: The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.

Photo: Jack Nicholson in The Pledge (2001)