Hi folks,

I am very interested in something that came up in the 'witnessing' thread, and that is - gender differences in anxiety behaviour.

First off, I think that I may be quite exceptional, as a male, in discussing my anxiety illness on an open forum. I've just realised that there is quite a shortage of other males posting here on this subject.

Anyway, I'm not a health professional, but I have long years teaching adults, including disturbed adults, and I have my own life experience to draw on. My anecdotal evidence is that men do not express their anxieties in the same way as women do.

I can't remember ever being in a group of men who talked openly about their personal anxieties, not one time in 58 years! However, working in adult ed, I was surrounded by women tutors, and I found that they regularly expressed their anxieties in group settings, and they found it very easy to do so.

So, in discussing 'witnessing anxiety and panic' the gender element must be considered. As I said elsewhere, for myself, my strategy to deal with panic disorder has been repression, control and isolation, with a public show of normality as paramount. If this is the case with me, and I am unusually open about my feelings, how are we to witness anxiety and panic in other males? My guess is that the nearest we will get to seeing overt panic in a male is aggression, a typical strategy that males use to cover their fear. I have seen it and experienced in my father many times, as you folks know.

However, just because a male won't speak about anxiety doesn't mean that he isn't in an anxiety state, and just because a female will speak about anxiety, doesn't mean that she is in an anxiety state.

The overt signals are confusing. Despite this I firmly believe that we can recognise genuine suffering when we see it, as one poster said, we see it the eyes. There is no mistaking the real thing.

Cheers, M

PS - Funny story. My unusualness hit me a couple of years ago. I had just been to a yoga session, where I was the only man in a room full of 30 women. I didn't think twice about this until I was leaving the gym, a door opened and I looked in to the kick boxing area, where 30 men were beating hell out of each other and there wasn't a woman to be seen! LOL