Author: Jay Patterson

As we come to the end of another year, I was reflecting on which man has had the most significant impact on society. I think history will show it will be Julian Assange, the slightly eccentric Australian journalist and founder of the web site Wikileaks. He has, of course, hit the world’s headlines recently for publishing secret communications from the US State department and alleging a politically motivated extradition to Sweden on sex offence charges. Assange’s impact will not be remembered by the legal battle he is currently fighting but by his philosophy of political activism that he espouses. Of…

Men have produced some of the most spiritually transcendent philosophies the world has ever seen. Christ, Buddha and Mohammed all lived at the dawn of history yet still remain revered by many. These were not just great thinkers, but great human beings. But not all men are like this. The male gender has also produced some of the worst rogues on record. Two of them, in the shape of Hitler and Stalin, in the 20th century alone. One theory is that whilst women converge to the mean on the spread of the population, men tend to have a broader spread…

I remember being in the office of my therapist when I was in my late twenties. I was agitated and distressed by the advancement of age and shouted “I’m being dragged kicking and screaming into middle age … and I don’t like it!” I can laugh about it now. After all, I would give a lot to look as good as I did then. I’m a bit more relaxed about the aging process these days. I have, after all, had a lot more time to get used to it. For a while though, it did stress me out. I was…

I can just about remember the start of the punk era. I was at junior school and I can recall the moral outrage these young men and women created by their wearing of mohikan hair styles, ripped jeans and pierced noses. It seemed the moral fabric of society was being shaken to its core. The values of a shared decency of dress were being challenged, and the backlash was both intense, and in hindsight, reactionary. With the passage of time, the innovations of punk are now the common currency of the fashion zeitgeist. We can pierce our bodies, shave our…

We can all feel low and poorly motivated from time to time. But for as many as 30% during our lives, our low mood and lack of motivation just won’t shift. Often, despite our best efforts, and the efforts of those who care for us, our low moods exhaust our ability to cope. We have become depressed. The question for mental health practitioners is how best to help someone who has become depressed? One treatment strategy, the medical approach, involves prescribing an antidepressant. These work on the neurotransmitters in the brain cells to improve our mood. The other strategy is…

This weekend hundreds of thousands of gay men from around the country and abroad are descending on Manchester to celebrate gay Pride. These showcase events celebrate the diversity of gay culture, and offer an opportunity for men of all ages to stand together – out and proud. But such festivals of gay culture hide some very disturbing truths. First, for many gay men, there is only one thing worse than coming out as gay … and that is finding out what the gay scene is like. In my experience, young gay men’s expectations of the gay scene is of a…

We all know blokes are prone to putting on the pounds around our guts. We know its not good for our health but mores the point we don’t like it, our partners don’t like it, and now there appears to be a way of getting rid of it that is painless, quick and doesn’t involve diets or exercise – sound too good to be true? Read on … Lasers have been used in a wide range of medical procedures for years. Rodrigo Neira, a plastic surgeon, noticed in 2001, that if he shone a laser at a culture of fat…

Today the Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon said the floods in Pakistan were the worst natural disaster he had ever seen. Indeed the figures are incomprehensible. 20 million people have been affected by the floods. Many of the people first affected have not yet been reached by aid workers. Millions face starvation and death by water borne disease. If the world does not act decisively now this disaster has the potential to spiral into an avoidable catastrophe. It could bring death to tens of thousands of people. Pakistani citizens need to know the world cares. In Great…

Anger is an emotion we all feel from time to time. It’s normal, even healthy. In fact if we don’t express our anger it can be unhealthy, making us stressed and even depressed. Feeling anger is morally neutral, it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. We are entitled to feel angry, but what we do to express it can be problematic, especially to women. Why is this? Well often when we get angry it triggers the ‘fight or flight’ response. This is a basic human instinct that is controlled by an evolutionary old part of the brain. As the…

It has been known for a long time that when a person consumes a dose of glucose orally, the body releases a greater quantity of the glucose-reducing hormone insulin than if the same quantity of glucose was injected directly into the bloodstream through a vein. This difference in insulin release is due to the action of a separate hormone called incretin, which is produced in response to the ingestion of food by the intestine. While the presence of an increased concentration of glucose in the blood stimulates the pancreas to produce the hormone insulin, the function of incretin is to…