The Silent Crisis of Men's Mental Health: Doctor Explains Stress, Medication & Support

Mental illness is not a new thing.

And it's been around since the start of time.

What we do know actually is that mental illness has been around since early Greek times and the early Romans and in ancient Egypt.

And we have documented evidence of people that suffered with their mental health going back thousands of years.

In ancient Greece, Hippocrates actually termed the idea of mental health, melancholia, which is where the word comes from.

And we know that when it comes to mental illness, early man had a very different lifestyle than modern stressors that you or I might undertake.

Stress in a sense is actually quite good for you.

You need some degree of stress.

In the morning, when you wake up, To get out of bed, you need a rise in cortisol, our primary stress hormone.

You need your heart rate and your blood pressure to come up a little bit so you can actually get out of bed.

If you don't have that cortisol rise, you're not going to get up.

You're not going to function.

But then what you want to see is over time, the cortisol levels come down and you get on with your daily activities because cortisol and high sympathetic nervous drive will make you anxious.

It stops you focusing and you feel jittery and unhappy.

The problem with modern society is we don't have good levels of highs and lows that we are evolutionarily designed to have.

We see chronic low levels of cortisol, which are just there all the time in the background, affecting our quality of life and making us stressed.

The history of how we've treated mental illness is somewhat of a sketchy one.

In terms of how we treat physical illness, we've all been familiar with various concepts through time and history where we think that illnesses are due to interventions from the gods or perhaps they're to do with the four humours not being balanced.

And we do various bizarre things like bloodletting or... horrible seizures to humans to try and improve their physical health.

And as barbaric as these are supposed to be, our treatment and management of patients with mental health illnesses have been actually far, far worse.

Back in the 18th, 19th and even 20th century, patients with mental illness would be put into insane asylums.

Now, these were containers or strictly monitored units where people with severe mental illness would be locked away for the benefit of what was perceived to be their good, but also the good of the general public.

There were no antidepressants.

There were no antipsychotics.

We had no way of even understanding what was wrong with people that were suffering with severe mental illness.