Textbook of Men's Mental Health - Book Review

There are many ways a textbook of men's mental health might approach its subject matter. It might, for example, examine recent men's studies literature on the social construction of masculinity (Levant & Pollack, 1995) and its implications for men's emotional well-being. In doing so, attention would be given to how the male gender role restricts men's optimal potentials and sometimes produces behavior disordered enough to be labeled mental illness. A second approach might start with the recognized categories of mental illness and identify differeing epidemiologies and symptom expressions between the sexes. The present volume takes the second tack since in the first paragraph of the Introduction uses the terms "mental health concerns" and "psychiatric issues" interchangeably, and although it strives to cover both approaches, it primarily succeeds in its efforts to explore "the clinical presentation and treatment of various psychiatric disorders in men" (p. xiii). As such, most of the material reads very much like an expansion of the DSM-IV-TR, with great of attention paid to the rates, clinical courses, and co-morbidities of specific psychiatric disorders.

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