There's something going on in the lives of men, and for many it’s causing stress, sometimes leading down a dark path to depression and anxiety. It’s the question of how to be a good father, husband and worker all at once. Psychologists say there’s a growing number of men who feel like they are trying to do all three, but having success at none.
“There’s this emotional pull to spend more time and do more in the family context,” says Paul Martin, a Brisbane psychologist from the Centre for Human Potential, who works with companies on their employee assistance programs.
“There’s a sort of tug-of-war going on and the guys who seem to really suffer are the ones who feel guilty most of the time [about not having enough time to give to work or to family].” Dr Elizabeth Celi, a psychologist and author in men’s health, says men and women are feeling the pressures of 21st century work-life balance, however, “the transition for men into this space is underestimated”.
It’s an issue that has gained particular prevalence now that generation X and some generation Y men are becoming fathers and, at the same time, often gaining greater job responsibility, which requires more of their time. At home is also a spouse – often working herself – who needs someone to share the motherload, and children who expect more from dad than a trip to the park on the weekend.
In the last census data available from 2006, 26 per cent of men reported working 49 hours or more a week. When all the hours of paid and unpaid work are added up for the genders, women still carry a greater load. But men are coming under increasing pressure. Two of every five (40 per cent) of full-time employed fathers say they would prefer to work fewer hours, according to a 2007 report Mothers and Fathers with Young Children: Paid Employment, Caring and Wellbeing. Among fathers working 55 hours or more per week, 61 per cent would prefer to work fewer hours.
Stretched too thin, “it can feel like they’re failing on all accounts, which can lead to depression”, says Martin, who has seen a rise in mental health issues for men struggling with work-life balance.
“Twenty-five years ago, when I first started out, we didn’t see one [man] with those issues,” he says.
A 2010 report by the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia found that nearly half of men feel consistently time pressured. It also reported that almost half of all fathers living in couple households work more than they would prefer and one-fifth of men working full-time were dissatisfied with their work-life balance.
Many workers spend the early part of their career wanting to be the boss. It seems glamorous to have staff to manage, planes to catch and conference calls to take. “There is this idealisation of that sort of lifestyle, or that type of dynamic, without recognising that for a lot of these people, the cost to them is often so profound,” says Martin.
The emotional demands on fathers used to, on the whole, be very low as society saw it as mum’s job to do the nurturing and dad’s to earn the money. It’s a broad-brush statement and not true for every case, but Martin observes there’s plenty of people now in their 30s, 40s and 50s who “have issues around the fact that their dad wasn’t there for them”. So modern men spending more time with their kids is healthier for the children, but, as Martin notes, “for the men quite a lot of people are really suffering out there”.
There is evidence to show that juggling stressful work and family commitments can lead to poor health outcomes. A French study, which looked at employees of France’s national gas and electricity company, found: “Individuals exposed to multiple work and family demands were especially likely to experience sickness absence days due to depression”. In that study, men who worked as associate professionals or technicians or clerks or manual workers were more likely than managers to experience days off work for psychiatric sickness if exposed to multiple stresses.
However, in Barry Bloch’s experience, executives are under pressure too. As a partner in leadership consulting at Melbourne firm Heidrick & Struggles, Bloch coaches executives and boards around the globe. “Often the board comes from an older generation that expects a different level of commitment from their executives, so I’ve certainly been involved in a number of cases where there has been a disconnect between the pressure the board puts on an executive in terms of their time commitments, their travel commitments, their preparedness to relocate, versus what happens when they’re at home.
“I’m seeing far more executives not accepting promotions, not accepting relocations, and I’m seeing, therefore, increasing conflict between the execs and the boards around those sorts of issues.” Some board members just don’t understand why younger men would give so much weight to their family’s wants because that just wasn’t how they did things in their time. They went and the family followed.The battle is leaving men feeling “quite isolated”, says Bloch.
Ways of coping
Statistically men suffer depression and anxiety less than women. However, when stress does strike, rather than deal with the cause of it and head off a crisis, men have a tendency to drink alcohol and use drugs to self-medicate. That in turn can lead to greater problems.
One of the big challenges for men is getting them to talk about their difficulties. “They see it as being very shameful and a sign of weakness if they are depressed themselves, but are a bit more accepting of it in somebody else,” explains associate professor Michael Baigent, clinical adviser at beyondblue, the national depression initiative.
Many are fearful of failure. Others are simply ignoring their health because they are more concerned with bringing in money, often to support their family. “I think probably the financial side is still the main thing that I see as an issue for men when they are depressed and the concern is about being able to maintain the family income and that kind of thing,” says Baigent.
Everyone needs to talk about things, says Martin. “Unfortunately the way that the brain is hardwired is that if you don’t communicate about negative emotion, it accumulates in the system and the tank gets full and leaks out over the edges,” he explains. “And when it’s full, that’s where you see mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, and you see absenteeism increase.”
Depression can brew for an extended period of time before the wheels start falling off. “All these formerly very strong, independent men then start feeling weak and that they’re falling apart,” says Martin.
Depression often grows from a feeling of no control. “It’s not just about having control over every aspect of your job but it’s about having general control about your day-to-day work,” says Therese Fitzpatrick – beyondblue’s national workplace program manager.
It’s vital, says Martin, that men talk about the issue. Simple tools can include writing about depression and work-life balance in staff newsletters or internal communications. It’s also a good idea to get men together in the same room for a lunchbox session or half-day seminar with a suitable facilitator.
“People get to talk, and when they see other people who are in the same boat … it automatically normalises that for them,” says Martin. Group sessions provide an opportunity to ventilate and release emotional pressure. “It gives them permission to talk about it and we’ve noticed that has enormous impact on emotional wellbeing and mental health issues in the workplace,” says Martin.
Celi suggests that men use fewer words and processes to communicate than women. “Pin-pointed verbal exchanges coupled with practical, and action-oriented information or activity can assist men to take control in building their bridges of support and finding functional ways of coping with stress, depression or anxiety symptoms,” she says.
Beyondblue has been running workplace programs for about eight years. The sessions raise awareness about depression and anxiety disorders, and teach people how to approach someone they’re concerned about. At first beyondblue’s clients were government bodies, now they include big professional service firms, and construction, mining and transport businesses. The program is aimed at creating a culture of early intervention, says Fitzpatrick. Part of that is training managers to spot people at risk.
“What I often hear from HR people is ‘we don’t know about the problem until it is way down the track,’” Fitzpatrick explains. By then the person has reached crisis point. It is better to reach them early.
Case Study
The Single Father
WHEN his baby Jak was six months old, Gregg Currie, 45, found himself juggling full-time care of his infant son with a high-flying role as chief executive of a major hotel group. His wife suffered massive postnatal depression and has never recovered. And after two years of hospitalisation and treatment, Currie was told she possibly would not recover. The couple separated and now, 10 years on, “she has not recovered”, says Currie.
One of the hardest things for the new single father was finding other men to talk to. “Women gave me heaps of advice but I actually wanted advice from men, and it was very hard to find men in my situation,” he says. “At the end of the day we are men and they are women and we do think differently.”
At first, Currie thought he could just soldier on. Whenever he had to fly somewhere, he’d pack Jak on the plane with him and arrange a carer to meet him at the airport or the hotel at the other end. If stuck, he’d take his young son to meetings and park him under the table.
“I was living on a plane and playing corporate guru,” Currie explains. He scraped by for a couple of years with nannies and babysitters.
“I was there every night for bedtime. It could have been a hotel room in Perth through to the Gold Coast. I’d leave corporate dinners and come home and do that at a hotel in Perth and go back to dinner. I could only offer one bit of regularity until I gave up the corporate life and that was to tuck him in every night.” After two years, Currie thought: “What the hell am I doing”?
“It took me a couple of years to come to the realisation that my son Jak needed a parent and not just a person who picked him up at six o’clock from day care and got him into bed by seven o’clock and then got him out of bed by 6am because we had to leave by 7am,” he explains.
Currie’s solution was to sell his house in Paddington and rent in Sydney while he raised the finance to build Bellachara, a luxury hotel in Gerringong on the south coast. He finished the chic hotel five years ago, and lives in Gerringong with Jak, now 10.
Running the hotel involves long hours and Currie rises early in the morning and gets a couple of hours work done before Jak wakes. That allows them to share breakfast together, and Currie is home every day by 4pm. “This has given Jak stability, a lifestyle,” says Currie, who remains a single parent. He says he’s the only full-time single dad that he knows in his town of about 5000 people.
Case Study
Stay-at-home Dad
James Windsor was a bit of an oddity at his local mothers group. He was the only dad. He was also often the only parent juggling four young children, aged just six months, two, three and four.
The business consultant, who has a background in outsourcing, decided to switch to caring for his children full time when his executive recruiter wife, Meg Ambrose, was transferred to Melbourne from Canada.
“We had a baby and three toddlers and we just thought ‘there’s no possibility we’re going to find someone who can handle this that we would be comfortable with and both of us working full-time,” Windsor, 43, explains. “I just decided I’d give it a try and loved it.”
By chance, Windsor’s Melbourne neighbour was also a stay-at-home dad. The pair sought out a wider network through the internet and managed to find a stay-at-home dad group that had about 20 members. Many were home with the kids because they had been laid off in the financial crisis but their wives had kept their jobs.
“In general mums want to hang out with mums and they want to talk about mum things, which often involves complaining about their husbands,” says Windsor. “You just don’t fit into that equation so just having guys who want to talk about guy things just makes a difference.”
Windsor was a full-time dad for 18 months, and now, with one child at school and two at pre-school, he works part time as a consultant – which gives him the flexibility to choose his hours and his clients. The young family have recently moved to Sydney.
“Being a stay-at-home dad is, I think for a lot of men, a very transient thing,” he says. It only happens for a couple of years and once your kids go to school, you tend to make other arrangements.
“It’s not a long-term thing and I think it really drives home the message that your kids are only small for a very short period of time. And so I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to go ahead and take that opportunity for a couple years and then get back into the workforce.”
Windsor admits a career break can be damaging though, in terms of job progression. “It probably does hurt your career. I used to manage a team of 50 people. I can’t imagine anyone is going to hire me today to go and manage a team of 50 people because I’ve been out of that role now for a few years.”
Case Study
Calling the shots
MARK Bennedick felt trapped working nine to five. So three years ago, he and a colleague went into business together, launching Sense Events. “I was not really too excited by the idea of being in an office 9 to 5 irrespective of whether the workload demanded it,” the 34-year-old says.
Bennedick finds himself working longer hours that he used to when he was on the payroll. But he chooses when he works. The Sydneysider is getting married this year and hopes to start a family soon after. His soon-to-be wife is Serbian and he says her family has a lot of cultural days that don’t fall on typical Australian holidays. “For instance their Christmas is on the 7th of January, which is when a lot of people are coming back to work,” Bennedick explains.
“I guess that’s the best thing about having your own business, you can decide ‘I’m going to take that day’ and I don’t really need to ask anyone to do that, and I can make it up any other time or I can work until midnight the night before if I have to.”
Mark isn’t quite sure exactly how he and his fiancé, Andjelka, will balance the care of their future children, but Mark’s pretty sure the plan won’t include too much childcare. “We just don’t buy into the new world model of both parents working 40 hours a week,” he says.
Depression the Signs
Beyondblue’s clinical adviser, associate professor Michael Baigent, says men often experience physical symptoms of depression such as headaches or nausea, tiredness, sleeplessness and irritability. They are less likely to present with complaints of unhappiness, no enjoyment and having lost all their love for life type of feelings. Often, men will confuse depression with not working hard enough.
“They see it as a problem with the way they are working, or a problem with the workplace more than actually being an illness in themselves, so they are more inclined to try and do things themselves, like work harder, longer, they might start drinking alcohol to handle the anxiety and the stress of it all, or the depressive feelings,” explains Baigent.
Anxiety disorders are also a problem. “Anxiety disorders do affect men and they’re very common in that about 10 per cent of men have an anxiety disorder in a 12-month period,” says Baigent. “They’re a bit more common than depression.” Disorders can include panic disorder, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These can really affect people’s ability to work or to go out and people will often use substances as a means of coping with it,” Baigent says.