The Centre is proud to have Phoebe Drioli-Phillips on board as a member dedicated to breaking new ground in the study of Australia’s most prevalent mental health disorder among men, anxiety.
Phoebe is in the final stages of completing her PhD in the Doctor of Psychology at the University of Adelaide with a keen interest in studying men's mental health and health related communications, help-seeking behaviours and health service utilisation.
In Australia, around one in ten men report having at least one anxiety-related condition. Despite this fact, Phoebe has noted there is a lack of academic research focusing on men's experiences with anxiety. She says the majority of emphasis has been placed on investigating depression and she sees it as her mission to work towards addressing this gap in knowledge by furthering our understanding of how anxiety impacts men.
"What a lot of people don't know is that anxiety, like depression, is also very strongly associated with suicide. So for me, it's really important that we improve our understanding of what it is to be a man living with anxiety in Australia.”
As part of her PhD studies, Phoebe analysed accounts of men describing their experiences of anxiety in online discussion forums and found men are blaming themselves for having the disorder.
“What we found is that the psychological and emotional burden of anxiety is so debilitating, that it is experienced as a sense of having lost control, being immobilised, or having lost function…Men in this study were caught in a vicious cycle wherein not only are they experiencing anxiety itself, but additionally the guilt and sense of weakness they feel from the self perception of being someone suffering from anxiety, compounds their distress.”
Phoebe’s important findings show how devastating anxiety can be to male wellbeing and that men have a tendency to blame themselves for their suffering. It’s a fact she believes clinicians need to be made aware of in order to facilitate a judgement free environment when working with men to ensure they receive the support they need to regain a sense of self-control that could be the difference between life and death.