How loneliness and depression drive people – especially men – to seek mental health support, and differences between the sexes and generations
- Women treat therapy like working out, but men ‘react to what is happening’, a counsellor says; younger men are more willing than older men to seek help
- To combat today’s loneliness ‘epidemic’, a family doctor prescribes joining a social group or making one phone call a week to help build social connections
When clinical psychologist Michael Beckham began offering therapy and counselling to clients in Hong Kong, he noticed cultural differences in how people access and use his services.
As a United States-trained and licensed clinical counsellor with almost two decades of experience, Beckham observed that the way people perceive and act on feelings is vastly different depending on their location, gender and culture.
For his US clients, a serious relationship issue is the trigger for their visit in about 15 per cent of cases; in Hong Kong, it is the issue in about 60 per cent of cases.
“In the US, there seems to be a lot of confusion as to what the emotions are,” he says. “In Hong Kong, clients are aware of what they are feeling, they want to know how to address it and how to change it.”
Beckham subscribes to the postmodern theory of psychology, which holds that the client is the expert in their life and the therapist is the listener.
The psychologist is there to provide guidance and clinical information, but mainly theirs is a collaborative effort to find and evaluate the traumas that are leading to the client’s unwanted behaviours.