The latest edition of the New Psychotherapist is out now. The New Psychotherapist is the Members’ journal of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and the latest edition has put ageing under the lens. There are a number of articles on ageing that can read from accessing the attached file. I am quoted in the feature on loneliness and the quotes I provided can be viewed on pages 24 and 25.
Greater mental health promotion campaigns, such as the Heads Together and Ask Twice, have helped to reduce stigma for men accessing treatment by sharing the message that it is okay to talk about feelings. However, providing more male friendly psychological treatment might require more therapists to consider the impact of masculine socialization on their clients and themselves, and how gender norms may negatively impact clinical engagement and outcomes. It has been my experience that therapy training schools often exhibit internal biases against the inclusion of men in their institutions. I have witnessed advertisements in therapy centres, for example, asking for participants to join therapeutic groups yet such advertisements unashamedly and routinely exclude men from participating in those very groups. A lot of good work has been done recently on raising greater awareness of diverse intersectional issues across wider society but it can still be commonplace that biases against men persist, in the very places where you might expect greater equality.
What extra training and resources do psychotherapists need to help people with loneliness, if at all?
With respect to men, counselling and psychotherapy training programmes need to be more specific about promoting and processing micro-skills (which could involve interventions such as self-disclosure and normalising), language adaptation (perhaps using male-oriented metaphors) and promoting counselling styles that might be more engaging for men (being more collaborative, transparent, action-oriented and goal-focused, for example).
Improving men’s outcomes in healthcare is, of course, a societal issue affecting many different sectors such as education, in particular. The parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee undertook extensive investigations as part of its enquiry into the pressing issues affecting male mental health in 2019. That committee received evidence that boys are particularly at risk of serious behavioural problems at a young age, and that serious behavioural problems are a major risk factor for adverse adult life outcomes. Persistent bad behaviour often becomes a disciplinary issue but that can be how poor mental health manifests in boys (and girls too). Evidence based parenting programmes who work with groups of parents struggling to manage their parenting responsibilities, or who are at risk of doing so, have been shown to be effective.
Noel Bell is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist based in London and can be contacted on 07852407140
