Movember began as a campaign raising awareness about men's mental health, prostate cancer and testicular cancer. To honor "Movember," many men stop shaving and grow a mustache.
Dr. Craig Bowron, a doctor and writer, has spent his career working as a hospitalist — a primary care doctor whose specialty is caring for hospitalized patients — at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. He is also a nationally published author, with works appearing in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes, MarketWatch, NextAvenue and more.
Bowron is also a longtime listener and supporter of KAXE who loves the outdoors and is known to frequent the Talmoonian System. He recently joined the KAXE Morning Show for a conversation about men's mental health.
Among other things, Bowron talked about the gendered expectations that often prevent men from discussing their feelings. Men are told to suck it up and internalize anxiety and depression in such a way that Bowron believes it a handicap to men's health.
"Mental health is very slippery because essentially, we're trying to probe our emotional loops — our thought loops, within our brain and there's no way to test that. An MRI can't help us out. Bloodwork can't help us out. "
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Bowron and John Latimer above!
Bowron says diagnosis of mental health issues is often about emotional intelligence, and men's vocabulary when it comes to mental health is limited. Women, he pointed out, read more fiction, where they learn the skill of empathy and a vocabulary to understand struggles.
"I joke that testosterone is one of the most powerful hallucinogenic in the world. It makes us feel very competitive, and part of the problem is that for men, even among friends, there's always a little healthy competition."
In his book, Bowron writes that every year, 1 in 5 adult Americans experience mental illness.
"Our moods are not binary like an on and off switch for light, but more like a dimmer switch," Bowron said. "You don't need to have an official diagnosis of anxiety or depression to deal with the feelings of anxiety or depression. You only need to be human."
In October 2022, Bowron released his first book, Man Overboard! A Medical Lifeline for the Aging Male.
Find more information on Man Overboard! here.
