There are calls for the male mid-life crisis to be taken more seriously.

An English professor wants us to stop thinking of the mid-life crisis as a time for men to get divorced and by a new car to think of it as a medical issue.

“It’s time to stop trivialising the midlife crisis,” says Professor Mark Jackson of Exeter University in England.

“If we prepared people for midlife rather than mocking them, they might be far better able to cope.”

“Mid-life is quite a complex time,” agreed Associate Professor Christina Bryant while speaking with Tom Elliott. “It is a time when people start to become aware that the years of their life are starting to run down.”

However, Ms Bryant from The School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne thinks “it is an exaggeration to call it a disease.”

Ms Bryant is also concerned with the language used to describe the mid-life crisis.

“The danger of using the crisis language is that we then trivialise real distress, when people really do have mental health problems.”

Click PLAY to hear more with Associate Professor Christina Bryant