Welcome
My name is Audrey Orage. I am a Senior Lecturer in Counselling at the University of Northampton and a Professional Doctorate student conducting new research into anxiety, which is a ‘no-go’ subject for many men.
Anxiety is a type of fear usually associated with the thought or image of a threat or something going wrong or bad in the future, but it can also arise from something happening right now. Some young people may describe this as ‘spiralling’, ‘overthinking’, ‘rapid breathing’, ‘feeling dizzy or light-headed’, or ‘stomach-churning’.
My Background
Before becoming a lecturer, I worked as a mental health social worker with many men and women of various ages and backgrounds.
I started to consider some of the unhealthy strategies men would report using to help them feel ‘calm’ such as smoking, alcohol and drugs in attempts at self-management of their mental health.
Later on, while working in the NHS, I began to work in the newly developed Improving Access to Psychological Therapies service (IAPT). I began to see more men who had not received a suitable level of care for their mental health. A common feature was that they believed they were experiencing depression, and it was affecting their ability to work and enjoy a meaningful life. As I explored this issue more deeply, I found that the main problem was often anxiety rather than depression.
The omission of anxiety as part of the problem had left them struggling to understand their mental health difficulties and how to access help and support.
During the lockdown, I began working remotely as a CBT therapist for a digital therapy company. I came across a number of young men (20 to 24) who were referred for or self-referred for CBT. They had a familiar story of issues starting in school around the age of 14 that affected their progress. After leaving school, some young men struggled to either get or maintain employment. As they reached their twenties, they started to believe they were a failure in life as their peers were getting on with further education, early careers and relationships. Some had been prescribed an antidepressant, and some had not. They weren’t sure how to explain their problems but believed they had depression. Interestingly, anxious thoughts and fear of bad things happening were more prominent when we explored their difficulties than dwelling on past adverse events.
I started to notice a pattern in men of their anxiety being overlooked, and it led me to want to understand this better and find out directly from young men what their own experiences of this are. I am interested in finding out more about young men’s experiences from a range of backgrounds. There are some professions, for example, the construction industry, which experience higher levels of mental health and research is lacking in understanding the reasons for these differences.
As well as my experiences from my professional background, I am also interested in researching anxiety in young men because of my own connections with family members and the devastating impact it can have. I want this taboo subject for men to be an open subject so that things are better for future generations like my pre-school-aged grandson. According to figures from the Mental Health Foundation, in 2022-2023, 29.9% of males reported suffering from high levels of anxiety.
Please click the menu pages to learn more about the study, the background of my research, and how you can get involved.