Mental Health

                I have been interested in men’s health most of my life. The event that triggered my life-long interest occurred when I was five years old. My mid-life father had become increasingly depressed when he couldn’t make a living to support his family and was hospitalized. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to keep it from happening to other families. I knew I wanted to be a healer when I grew up.

                I graduated from college and was accepted at U.C. San Francisco Medical School in 1965. I hoped to become a psychiatrist, but later transferred to U.C. Berkeley when I found that medical school was too limited and didn’t focus on the whole person. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley’s School of Social Work in 1968, and my first job was in a residential treatment program for people, mostly men, who had substance abuse problems.

                When our first son, Jemal, was born in 1969, I made a promise that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to help create a world where men were fully engaged and involved with their families throughout their lives. In 1972, I launched MenAlive, one of the first programs in the country to focus specifically on Men’s Health.

                Although there have been numerous men’s health programs that have sprung up over the years, most of them didn’t last long. I believe there has been a myth that the entire healthcare system is really geared towards the needs of males and we don’t need programs specifically for men. Yet, we know that studies continue to show that men, as a group, die at a younger age than do women and men suffer from most chronic diseases at higher rates than women.

                My colleague Will Courtenay, PhD, author of Dying to Be Men, says,

“Men in the United States have greater socioeconomic advantages than women. These advantages, which include higher social status and higher-paid jobs, provide men with better access to health-related resources. Despite these advantages, men — on average — are at greater risk of serious chronic disease, injury, and death than women.”

                Not only did I see the problem in my own family, but in the families of thousands of clients who came to MenAlive since we began in 1972. I have written seventeen books on various aspects of men’s health. My most popular and widely read book, Male Menopause, was first published in 1997 and became an international best-seller, translated into fifteen foreign languages. The research findings reported in the book concluded:

“Men, like women, experience complex hormonal rhythms that affect their sexuality, mood, and temperament.”

Gameday Men’s Health: Made For Every Man’s Health Journey

                When I first learned about Gameday Men’s Health I was very impressed. They were offering the kind of service that I’ve rarely seen in any healthcare setting.

                When I visited the Gameday website, I got a feel for the program:

“The level of comfort we provide you can be summed up in one word: Unparalleled. To be your best, you have to feel your best. That’s why when you walk into Gameday, we start you off on the right foot. Sit in an overstuffed chair while you watch sports on flat screens or read a recent copy of Men’s Health Magazine, enjoy complimentary refreshments and snacks, and best of all – experience fast appointment times. Come hang out in comfort that you will be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.”

                I was even more impressed after I interviewed the founder of Gameday Men’s Health, Evan Miller, PhD.

                I asked Dr. Miller how he came to be involved with men’s health issues.

“Similar to you, my background is on the clinical side,” he told me, “I’m a PhD in clinical psychology so I come at this whole medical health care world from a very psychological angle. After grad school I got right into the addiction treatment industry and started a treatment center.”

                I immediately felt Dr. Miller was a kindred spirit.

“I really fell in love with the work, with treating men especially, helping take them from feeling broken to becoming fully healed. I loved seeing the light come back in their eyes as healing occurred. But its 24/7 work and I kind of got burnt out.”

                As someone who worked in the addictions field for many years, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“I wanted to do something else,” Dr. Miller continued. “I wanted to cast a wider net. I wanted to get the average mainstream guy feeling better.”

                I was smiling and nodding with shared recognition.

“Now, here’s where the personal side came in,” he went on. “I was thirty-four, thirty-five, but I didn’t feel like myself. I’d been an athlete my whole life, taken care of myself. I knew how to eat well, sleep well, exercise. But I just wasn’t there. Just by happenstance, I got my lab-work done and asked to have my testosterone levels checked.”

                Here’s where Dr. Miller’s story gets really interesting for him and for millions of men like him.

“They first told me, I didn’t need my testosterone levels checked. ‘You’re young, wait until your sixty-five, then we’ll test you.’” 

                Fortunately, Dr. Miller insisted on knowing what his testosterone levels were. The tests revealed that his testosterone was very low, which helped account for the negative way he was feeling.

                From there the idea of Gameday Men’s Health was born. How about I create a program for men that begins with hormone health number one. Let’s put it into a setting that is comfortable, he thought.

“That was it, and off we went.”

                Now I was really intrigued and wanted to know more details.

“We’re still a young company,” Dr. Miller began, “We started Gameday in 2018. It was one clinic in Carlsbad, California, near San Diego. I wanted to create a model that didn’t look like a doctor’s office, that felt like a sports lounge, or a cool kind of men’s health hangout.”

                But Dr. Miller wanted more than to change the ambience of the setting. He wanted to change how care was given.

“I wanted it to be fast and effective,”

Dr. Miller told me.

“So, I put a licensed lab right in the clinic so guys could get what they needed quickly and effectively:

                Step 1: Enter a welcoming clinic space, complete a quick intake form, have a simple blood test and receive results in just 15 minutes.

                Step 2: Meet an expert clinic director who specializes in all things – testosterone hormone optimization, sexual health and erectile dysfunction, weight loss, peptide therapy and vitamin therapy. Discuss your concerns with them and receive a tailored evaluation to understand your needs.

                Step 3: If eligible, begin your personalized treatment plan right away, crafted specifically for your goals.”

                Then things really took off. Men were coming from all around and Dr. Miller opened other clinics in the San Diego area. He knew there was a huge need for what he had created.

“We decided to franchise Gameday in 2022 and by 2023 we became the fastest growing franchise of all time. We have 335 locations open now and 1,000 locations in development.”

                “The demand is huge,” Dr. Miller concluded. “Men want real health care. Guys are waking up and saying I want to feel better now. I don’t want to wait in line for care that is limited and doesn’t address my needs.”

                This is the kind of health care I believe the world needs. You can learn more about Gameday Men’s Health by going to their website. https://gamedaymenshealth.com/

                You can learn more about Dr. Evan Miller here.  You can view the full interview with Evan Miller, PhD, here.

                I told Dr. Miller, I would like to interview him again and hear about how Gameday Men’s Health is progressing. If you would like to read more articles about men’s health issues, I invite you to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter.

The post Gameday is a Game Changer in the Emerging  Men’s Health Field appeared first on MenAlive.

                Frederick Marx is an Academy and Emmy nominated filmmaker and author. He most well-known for his film Hoop Dreams. In a recent article by Shahnaz Mahmud published by the Sundance Institute Mahmud says,

“Once in a while a rare film comes along that demonstrates cinematic storytelling at its absolute finest, shaking us to our core and encouraging us to think differently about the world we live in.”

                He goes on to say,

“Hoop Dreams accomplished that — and so much more. The sports documentary, which chronicles the lives of two inner city youths in Chicago as they pursue dreams of playing professional basketball — and escaping their dangerous environment — is still perceived as seminal work.”

                Hoop Dreams left Marx wondering who exactly is doing what’s necessary to mentor adolescent boys across the threshold into maturity.  He made the TV mini-series Boys to Men? to find out, wanting to hear directly from teen boys themselves how they approach the challenges of adult masculinity.

                Marx has created many more films, books, and articles through his company Warrior Films.

                In his book, Rites to a Good Life, Marx says,

“I think the greatest crime of the last two centuries has been the countless millions of children who have been brought into the world but never taught to discover their unique purpose in life.”

                He goes on to quote Michael Meade who reminds us of what’s at stake:

“When a culture doesn’t provide formal Rites of Passage or initiations, people find their own. Or they don’t find them and never really find the traction of their life. And when a society or culture doesn’t attempt to create circumstances in which that can be worked on creatively, then you get usually destructive versions of them.”

                We recognize the effect of these missing Rites of Passage in the behavior of many of our boys as well as many adult males at all levels of society — from our bedrooms and boardrooms to our federal government. 

“All these men have something in common,” say psychologist Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. “They are all boys pretending to be men. Their kind of ‘manhood’ is a pretense to manhood.”

                The historian, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes political leaders throughout the world who are “boys pretending to be men.” In her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she says,

“For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.”

Dr. Mark Schillinger and The Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend (YMUW)

                All young people, males and females, need Rites of Passage. However, when they are missing for our boys and young men, the results are disastrous for everyone. There is an African proverb:

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

                We are all aware of the violent behavior of uninitiated boys and men.

                The Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend was founded by Dr. Mark Schillinger, DC. Mark was inspired by Brad Leslie who started a weekend mentoring program for young men in Vancouver, Canada in 1990. Mark took his son to this program and when he returned he knew he needed help raising his son as a single parent.

                He put out a call for help in the Bay Area and with the commitment and cooperation of dozens of caring mothers, fathers, and mentors the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend was born. I had the opportunity to interview Mark for one of my recent podcasts. We had a lively discussion which you can watch here.

                In 2012 YMUW was one of 25 organizations selected to participate in the first International Rite of Passage Council, founded by Frederick Marx. YMUW has now produced more than 50 initiation events, graduating more than 3500 young men. I asked Mark to tell us a bit more about the weekend.

“The purpose of the weekend is to provide young men with a weekend filled with incredible fun and challenges, while building a foundation for a confident and successful adulthood, through learning the importance of teamwork, developing a sense of accomplishment and acquiring leadership skills.”

                I recently received an email from Mark about an upcoming weekend.

“We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the 2025, Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend. a modern, wilderness-based rite of passage adventure camp for young men ages 13  to 20.”

                This life-changing weekend, featured on CNN’s, “This Is Life with Lisa Ling,” gives our sons the opportunity to:

• Step away from digital distractions.
• Be mentored by experienced, trained, men of our community.
• Face meaningful challenges designed to build his character and confidence.
• Discover who he truly is and how he wants to show up in the world.
• Channel his energy constructively.

                The next weekend will take place on June 19-22, 2025. You can get more information on this weekend as well as other events for young men and their families by visiting the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend Website: https://www.ymuw.org/.

                You can also get more information about this event and other supportive programs for young men and their families by contacting Mark directly:

Phone: (415) 479–4100
Email: help@ymuw.org

Our Office:
119 A Paul Dr., San Rafael, CA 94903
(Note this is not the location of the weekend).

                You can also learn more about Frederick Marx and his work by visiting his website: https://warriorfilms.org/.

                If you would like to read more articles like these, please feel free to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter here: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/

The post Rites of Passage: The Hope for the Future of Boys, Men, and Humanity appeared first on MenAlive.

                Alanna Kaivalya, PhD is on a mission to awaken the feminine soul and improve the love lives of women and men throughout the world. She is a bestselling author, educator, thought leader, and expert on women’s empowerment. In her new book, The Way of the Satisfied Woman: Reclaiming Feminine Power.

                She begins her book with two provocative questions for women.

“What if there was a way to become a fully Satisfied Woman: one who measured meaning on her own terms, recovered her feminine power, dropped masculine expectations for herself, and ascended to her own queenly throne? What if you could have your needs, desires, and cravings fulfilled in a way that empowered, enlightened, and enlivens you?”

                I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Kaivalya for my podcast and found her to be a lively and informed guest and a kindred spirit for the work I’ve been doing with men over the last fifty years. You can view the podcast here. At a time when there is so much confusion about men, women, and relationships, Alanna brings clarity. Instead of adding to the conflicts between women and men, between the feminine and the masculine, she brings healing salves of joy and delight.

                “Let’s start with the femininity,” she says, “Most people assume the word relates to anything female, but what I want us to learn into here is the dynamic psychic (as in ‘of the psyche’) energy that is opposite and complementary to the masculine. Every human, regardless of gender assigned at birth, has both masculine and feminine energy in their psyche.”

                One of the things I most appreciated about Alanna’s work was her willingness to recognize the evolutionary realities that most humans and all living things come in one of two varieties — female or male.

“I speak to people whose gender assigned at birth is female and who primarily express the feminine polarity,”

                Alanna says.

“This is not because other genders and expressions are not valid — of course they are!”

                she goes on to state.

“But this book seeks to reframe femininity for cisgender women and offer support in releasing the paradigms of masculinity that have repressed and oppressed us for far too long.”

                This is good news for women, but also for men. I had similar goals for my book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. In my book and an on-line course I offer, I say,

“We all want real, lasting love, whether we are in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond. Yet too many marriages fall apart and most people don’t know why. They become disillusioned with their marriage. They mistakenly believe that they have chosen the wrong partner, and the relationship falls apart.”

                After going through the grieving process, they start looking again. But after more than fifty years as a marriage and family counselor I have found that most people are looking for love in all the wrong places. They don’t understand that disillusionment is not the beginning of the end, but the third stage of love.

                Most of us grew up with romantic notions of relationships. We went looking for that magical someone, our soul partner, and we fell in love (stage 1). After that stage 2 was easy — and they lived happily ever after. But when disillusionment sets in, we feel we made the wrong choice or we just drifted apart. We go through a grieving process and start looking again or give up on love and marriage.

                Here is my conception of a more enlightened path with the following stages:

• Stage 1: Falling In Love
• Stage 2: Becoming a Couple
• Stage 3: Disillusionment
• Stage 4: Creating Real, Lasting Love
• Stage 5: Using the Power of Two to Change the World

                Alanna is also a believer in the power of love. In her chapter on “The Satisfied Relationship,” she says,

“Perhaps the most important relationship for the modern adult feminine women is intimate partnership. Far from being a clichéd or old-fashioned notion, it is within the sacred dynamic of masculine and feminine that the feminine flourishes.”

                She goes on to say,

“This relationship has the potential to heal the greatest wounds suffered by the feminine, which are often — ironically — at the hands of the distorted masculine.”

Alanna shares the experiences that most all women know well.

“Whether it was our father, brother, boys at school, or members of the wider community, it is nearly inevitable that a young woman experiences some type of psychological, emotional, or physical harm from the opposite polarity. Whether unintentional or intended, whether violent or subtle, these leave indelible marks on the psyche that forever shape our adulthood.”

                This is another area where Alanna and I are in total agreement.

“I can’t emphasize it enough,” she says. “We are wounded in relationship. And we are ultimately healed in relationship.”

                I describe two primary purposes of Stage 3, Disillusionment. First, we must let go of our romantic illusions where we project our unmet needs, our hopes and dreams on our partner. We can’t have a successful relationship until we see our partner as a complex human being. In order to do that, the second purpose is to heal our childhood wounds with our mothers and fathers.

“We are all wounded,”

Dr. Kaivalya reminds us.

“While that may sound fatalistic, cynical, or like a total bummer, it is simply part of the human psychological condition.”

                No one gets through childhood without having experienced wounding from our mothers and fathers, whether they were physically present or absent. Alanna details the mother wound by describing two polarities of “Enmeshment” and “Abandonment.” All of us, whether female or male, came through the body of a woman. Most of us are aware of the deep connection and need for our mothers.

                But too often, women and men, grow up without the emotional presence of a father. Alanna has an important section in her book, “The Father Wound: Dealing with Daddy Issues.” I wrote a whole book My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. I said,

“There is one problem that surpasses all others in its impact on men, women, and society. It is the family father wound. The father wound, resulting from physical or emotional absence, has been largely ignored. Without a strong sense of inner guidance, men can become abusive towards women and destructive towards men.”

                As Dr. Kaivalya recognizes, the father wound impacts women as well. She says,

 “I can feel the resistance in many readers even as I’m about to write these words: women inevitably fall in love with a replica of their fathers. There I said it.”

                Alanna speaks to women in the same way I speak to men.

“Whether our fathers were present in our lives or not, whether we participate in heteronormative relationships or not, when we look across the span of intimate relationships as adult women, what we find is a common thread that relates back to our early childhood experiences with the masculine parent or caregiver.”

                I think everyone will recognize why I recommend Alanna’s book and her work for both men and women.

                You can learn more about Dr. Alanna Kaivalya by visiting her website: https://www.thesatisfiedwoman.com/

                You can see the interesting podcast discussion I had with Alanna here.

                If you would like to read more interesting articles like these, I invite you to join our community and receive my free newsletter here.  

The post The Way of the Satisfied Woman & The Five Stages of Love appeared first on MenAlive.

               In my recent article, “The Evolution of Manhood and the Emergence of Compassionate Warriors,” I introduced you to the work of Dr. Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. Dr. Hrdy has recently turned her attention to men. In “Father Time: How Dad’s Are Being Called to Change the World for Good,” we go deeper in exploring the ways dads today are nurturing young children.

               Here we’ll explore what Dr. Hrdy describes as “a new kind of father,” hands-on dads who are leading the way to a better future for their own children and changing the evolutionary future of humankind. 

                In introducing her colleague, Dr. Ruth Feldman, Dr. Hrdy says,

“Born to an illustrious rabbi, Ruth Feldman was a precocious child, beginning to talk by eighteen months. What a shame, a colleague of her father’s once remarked, that his unusually bright daughter was not a son. Among Orthodox Jews, traditionally, it is sons who become scholars. Daughters do other things. Reminiscing years later, Feldman attributed her father’s decision to break with such tradition and promote his clever daughter’s intellectual development to their unusually close relationship. It planted her a powerful drive to succeed.”

                Like Dr. Hrdy, Ruth Feldman began her illustrious career exploring the importance of mothers to the life of her children. But then she became interested in the specific ways that fathers contribute to the wellbeing of children and society. Together with Eyal Abraham and others, Feldman’s team decided to study the changes going on with men who were becoming hands-on parents, involved with their wives in providing care for children beginning at birth. They included a subset of men who were even pairing up with other men to start a family as a same-sex couple. Some were adopting babies, others contracting with surrogates, then nurturing the babies right from birth with no mother involved.

                As Dr. Hrdy reminds us,

“For over 200 million years that mammals have existed, exclusively male care of babies from birth onward has never happened before. Yet, something’s happening now that has never occurred before.”

               As CBS News reported in 2024,

“When it comes to handling a pair of toddlers, Pete Buttigieg, the unflappable Secretary of Transportation, may appear a little jet-lagged. Pete and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, raise their two-year old twins, Penelope and Gus, in Traverse City, Michigan, where they recently moved full-time from Washington to be closer to family. The kids call Pete ‘Papa,’ and Chasten ‘Daddy.’”

               Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten may be a most well-known pair raising their children from birth with only male parents, but they are certainly not the only ones. What we are learning about the male father’s brain is illuminating for all of us.

                Hrdy reported that the Feldman team recruited 89 couples in stable relationships who were first-time parents with babies between 12 and 18 months old. 48 of the couples were same sex-partnerships of two men, while 41 were heterosexual parents living in “traditional” families where the mother acted as primary caretaker (and, in most cases, breastfed), with the father merely helping her out.

                Later, as parents lay inside a magnetic resonance machine watching videos of themselves interacting with their babies, Feldman and coworkers scanned their brains. In the secondary caregiving men from “traditional” family contexts, neural circuits in the cortical region of their brains important in social discrimination and decision-making really lit up.  These were the areas that helped me, as a new dad, figure out what my newborn son needed and think through various options — was he hungry, cold, wet, excited, tired, etc. — and act appropriately.

                The biggest surprise, however, was what happened in the brains of the unusual, first-of-their-kind men acting as primary caretaker for a baby with no woman involved. (This is what went on in my brain when my wife had left me in total care of our infant son when she took a two-week break to go off with her girlfriend when Jemal was a year old.)

                “In their brains,” Hrdy reported Feldman’s findings, “emotion-processing networks involving the amygdala and hypothalamus were stimulated as well. These ‘ancient’ networks dating back to the first mammals, and even further, to their vertebrate precursors. They derive from the same highly conserved neural networks that for 200 million years helped hypervigilant mammalian mothers keep their babies safe.”

                “Now, these same limbic system areas were being activated in the brains of men — but only when the baby’s safety and well-being had become those men’s primary concern day after day.”

                When my wife was away and I was alone with our son, I was aware of every sound that might indicate danger or that our son needed something. Once those circuits become activated, they stay active forever.

                When we adopted our daughter, Angela, I was often on duty at night when my wife was asleep. It was me who often heard her whimpers and instantly awakened at the first sign of something amiss.

                In more and more families today we have men and women working together hand-in-hand to raise children. As Dr. Hrdy and Feldman point out, males and females often parent children differently — men tend to be more active and risk-taking with small children, throwing them up in the air and catching them (much to the horror of moms who worry that we may drop them). But the children love it and good fathers, like good mothers, never drop their infant babies.

                Through evolutionary history mothers have learned to keep their babies safe and alive. What Hrdy, Feldman, and others have shown is that men have the same capacity built into our brains. We can keep our babies safe, but men also can introduce babies to new experiences and that is important too. Good parents, whatever their sexual orientation, learn to be partners in working together.

                Dr. Feldman says that she likes to think about good parenting as 12 bar blues where your left hand is playing that 12 bar blues again and again and it’s predictable and safe. The right hand can improvise, come up with exciting new riffs. The mothers provide the safety and the fathers provide the risk-taking variety. Both are needed.

                In this short video, Dr. Feldman describes what her studies have taught us about the male brain and how it works to provide the vital functions that children need right from the very beginning of life. She also emphasizes that fathers and mothers don’t always realize how vital a father’s involvement is with their babies right from the beginning of life. Men often need encouragement and support to let them know they can trust their own parental instincts just as mothers learn to do.

                I was fortunate to have a wife who was an involved mom from the beginning, but also knew she needed time to herself after the baby was born and trusted me to step in. I was terrified at first, but once I was on my own, I realized I wasn’t really on my own. Even though my wife was gone for two weeks, I learned that my one-year-old son, Jemal, was right there with me. He knew what he needed and he taught me to trust my instincts. We made a great team which continues to serve us well. Jemal is now 53 years old. He and his wife have a child of their own and he tells me I was a great role-model for him about how to be a good dad.

                Our daughter, Angela, is 51, and has four children. She, too, credits me with being an involved, hand-on Dad and her experiences with me have offered a model of what a good parent must do in order to give our children and future generations the best change for a good life.

                I hope all men can learn how vital we are to the wellbeing of our children and that women can learn to trust that fathers can be as good parents to the children as mothers can. Our children, grandchildren, and future generations need us now more than ever.

                I always appreciate comments. It’s the way I know what I’m sharing makes a difference in people’s lives. If you appreciate articles like these and want to read more I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here:

The post Time For Fathers: How Hands-on Dads May Be the Hope For Our Future appeared first on MenAlive.