Health, Men's Health, Mental Health
It has been fashionable since the 1960s to talk about the Midlife Crisis.
What happens, so the story goes, is that the middle-aged, and middle-aged men in particular, become fed up with their lot – the loss of muscle, the loss of libido, the erectile dysfunction, the fatigue and depression. This leads them to do things like buying a red sports car and wearing too-tight shiny jackets with shirts open at the neck to reveal chest hair and gold medallions, and it leads to them ditching the wife for a younger model met at the school gates, all in a futile attempt to turn back the clock.
The writer and psychologist Eliot Jacques is widely credited with coining the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ in a paper published in 1965 – the same year, as it happens, that The Who recorded My Generation (“I hope I die before I get old.”) In his paper Jacques wrote that ‘a man at midlife is suffering from loss of youthful, narcissistic pride.’ Jacques research was not based on average or typical men entering middle age, but a range of creative geniuses. Examining the careers of a number of composers and artists, Jacques detected abrupt changes in style or declines in productivity around the age of 35. This led him to suggest that a critical transition begins around this age, and he suggested that it happens not only in creative geniuses, but in some form in everyone. In his view, the crisis was precipitated by the realisation that one had fewer years left to enjoy than years already lived and moreover, it occurred typically in men rather than women. To generalise to the entire population on the basis of such an unrepresentative and distinctive sample is something of a stretch, to say the least.
The phrase ‘midlife crisis’ really took off and crept into popular vernacular in the 1970s when Yale psychologist, Daniel Levinson began popularising tales of middle-class, middle-aged men who were struggling with transitioning to a time where “one is no longer young and yet not quite old.” He thought that men experience changes as ‘a fundamental threat and so experience crisis and despair’ and that almost all men would experience such a crisis sometime between the ages of 40 and 45.
The concept of midlife crisis is now such a well-known trope that people are generally confident that midlife crises definitely exist and believe that they would recognise a person who was in the midst of one. The problem is that there is little real evidence to support this proposition; the mid-life crisis really is a myth.
In 1995, more than 30 years after Jacques’ paper appeared, research teams at the universities of Harvard and Michigan conducted a study into all things mid-life with over 7000 people. This study found that although people at midlife do have crisis, they actually have no more-and no less-than people at any other age. More than this, people between the ages of 40 and 60 years of age often report feeling better than they did when they were younger. Most said they felt more productive and more involved in meaningful activities, and there is little evidence of the supposed ‘empty nest syndrome.’
In a 50-year, longitudinal study, this time with women only, alumnae from Mills College in the U.S. were contacted at the ages of 27, 43 and 53. At the older ages, most of the women felt that they were more confident, independent, decisive, dominant, self-affirming, less self-critical and had better coping skills. Comments such as “having s sense of my own person, feeling more confident” were reported. It is true, that the Mills College studies could be accused of the same problems as Jacques research; that is that people studied were not representative of society as a whole, but there is support for these findings from numerous other studies.
Taken from The 7 Myths of Middle Age by Crispin Reed & Helena Rubinstein
