Is Therapy Failing Men?

This should not come as news. I have, for many years now, decried the simple fact that today’s therapy is geared toward women. It either treats men like women or it does not treat them at all.

Heather Mac Donald described a new Yale University therapy center:

Last year, Yale University created a safe space that will set the industry standard for years to come. Call it the college woke spa, though its official title is the Good Life Center. Featuring a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops, the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy. 

Of course, it is not just universities that have been feminized. The therapy world has suffered the same fate. The New York Post reports:

Sadly, there just aren’t enough male therapists to choose from.

Almost two-thirds of psychologists in the United States are female.

Eighty percent of clinical psychologists are female.

Some 75% of psychology graduate students are female.

This is one reason why therapy is failing men.

As it happens, female therapists in particular do not know how to treat men. They try to use the same model on men and women, and this leads to a higher rate of male depression and suicide.

Consider the differences:

Which brings us back to the idea of “male-based depression.” Adam Lane Smith, a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in treating both men and women, says that male depression tends to revolve around feelings of helplessness and powerlessness.

“Men need the ability to change their environment, create an impact that lasts (a legacy), and to either stop their pain or make it have purpose,” he explained.

They are less interested in having their feelings validated, and more interested in finding a solution.

They want answers, and they want them now.

Female depression, on the other hand, “tends to center around feeling unloved or feeling useless to the people they love,” Smith noted. “Women need to feel cared for, appreciated, and helpful.”

So, men want to function in the world. They are more likely to want to be coached than therapied. Apparently, women want to feel their feelings and to take warm baths of empathy.

Men want to have a sense that they can do something to improve their circumstances. Women, not so much.

This difference contains a crushing irony. We understand well that men validate themselves by how well or poorly they function in the world. And yet, haven’t we learned that today’s modern women also want to function in the world. What message are we sending women when we refuse to help them to manage their lives but pretend that they need merely to have their feelings validated?

Perhaps therapists are stereotyping women, making them creatures of feeling and emotion, suggesting that they cannot do anything to improve their conditions. If this is so, one might understand that women feel disempowered, to the point where they are being told that if they want anything to happen in the world they must rely on men.

Curiouser and curiouser….