Summary: We feature highlights from the Intimate Partner Abuse of Men Workshop held on Wednesday 16 June 2010 in Perth, Western Australia. The workshop was aimed at service providers plus anyone who works with victims and perpetrators of family and domestic violence, and considered the implications for service providers of the Edith Cowan University (ECU) Intimate Partner Abuse of Men research. In this, the fifth part of the workshop, Professor Rob Donovan talks about men’s help-seeking behaviour. Listen now (MP3) Rob Donovan: Well, I think the real expert on engaging with men is the talk after mine, but I have been involved over the years on research with men’s help-seeking behaviour. And so I’m gonna provide a broader brush, if you like, because the sort of work I do generally goes into public education and overall communication strategies. But some of the group research and the qualitative research we’ve done gives us some insights. I think we self-destruct. One of the common themes that comes out when you talk to men about their health - they do have an awareness that they smoke too much, they drink too much, they take too many risks, they don’t watch their diet, and all other sorts of occupational things. There’s that realisation there that yes, the reason that the statistics are different for morbidity and mortality for men and women is that men are more wilful at engaging in unhealthy behaviours and pastimes. Men tend to soldier on and be the hero. Yes, we sort of feel that we’re in charge, or we’re believed to be, or hoped to be in charge, and that when things go wrong and we’re feeling a bit off and that, nevertheless the expectation from society out there, and even from within our families, is that we’ll be stoic. We’ll keep going, and we will solve the problem for everybody. And so we tend to soldier on regardless of how we feel ourselves, because we want to be the hero... and besides – we’re in the dark a lot. We tend not to know where services are, how to access them, what the real facts about health, what are the causes and risks and so on for different diseases? And that’s, of course, why we rely on women to a large extent, if there are women in your life. So what’s the overall problem as I see it? Well, it’s basically “men don’t seek help.” They don’t seek help for relationship problems, either with their partner or with their kids, for family relationships in general, for mental health issues, and of course the big one there is suicide stats - and over 80 percent of people who take their own lives are men – and for physical health issues, as well. And they don’t seek help either ever - it just gets all too much, and away they go - or they don’t seek it soon enough, and they don’t seek it often enough. So they go to GP’s less often, and when they do go to a GP they’re less likely to talk about other problems other than the immediate one. And they tend to find GP’s not particularly easy to talk to, either. Just a little anecdote there... a few years ago I was talking - working, rather - on a ‘time to treat’ program for the National Heart Foundation. They wanted to increase awareness that if you have chest pains that persist over 20 minutes, you should call an ambulance and get to hospital. If you get to hospital within a particular certain time, and you get a drug, then that can arrest the heart attack, if that’s what you’re having, and can lessen the likelihood of permanent damage to the heart. So the key thing is call an ambulance and get there within 20 minutes. So I wrote three ads for this campaign, which we went out and tested. They were based on research we’d done with people who had had a heart attack. And then, one night, I was lying in bed, and around half-past-two I started to experience some chest discomfort.
