What America Gets Wrong About Men’s Mental Health
Post Topic:
Men’s Mental Heath
American culture discourages boys from expressing their feelings and treats many men as dangerous.
Therapists often ask, “why don’t more men go to therapy?” Here is what I learned from men I know.
America faces a mental health crisis. Many communities are struggling and yet not all of them feel comfortable seeking help. Men experiencing emotional pain might not feel as though they can even begin to talk about it.
This post is dedicated to my friend Rasheed. You’re one of the wisest people I know. I’ve learned many things about how America treats men’s emotional lives by talking to you. As a woman studying to become a therapist, I feel like the mental health field needs to do more to understand men.
Rasheed, you and I tell very similar stories about our lives growing up. Both of us lived through some tough times. We’ve tried to grow from our difficulties. We both care sincerely about the idea of mental health.
Sometimes we joke that we are “the same person in a different font.”
I asked my favorite AI art tool to draw that feeling.
Now, Rasheed, you’ll notice there’s something wrong with these two pictures above.
1.) Dang that woman looks like me. She’s PRETTIER but the vibe is definitely there.
2.) That man doesn’t really look like you at all.
3.) Wow dude this is no surprise to any of our fellow internet-dwelling people but ai is PROBLEMATIC.
4.) You can’t see the man’s face up there. My art project is not off to a great start. That’s okay. It’s a tricky concept to visualize. I’m trying to convince a robot to draw a philosophical idea.
The point that I’m trying to go for here is:
Men and women may have very different experiences in society. At the end of the day, we have so much in common as human beings. No matter who you are, your mental health is important.
At this point I realized I was going to need some expert help. I went into the other room of the apartment and yelled, “HELP ME!”
Me, Writer and Neurotic Millennial Art Girlie
“HELP HELP I am trying to get this AI Art tool to draw our friend Rasheed
it is not going well
I can’t even get this robot to draw his face. EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.”
Josh, Editor and Voice of Sanity/Wholesome Zoomer Dude
“You’re probably being way too specific. And wordy. Are you giving the AI a description that’s 5600 words long with everything about the guy?
Just give the robot a basic description of Rasheed and then focus on the emotion of the piece.”
SURELY THIS WILL SOLVE MY PROBLEM!
Well. Kind of. At least now you can see the man’s face.
But this still doesn’t look like the picture I wanted the robot to draw.
If I tell the robot that I want a picture of a “man" I see this blonde dude who definitely isn’t you, Rasheed:
Me, Trying To Do AI Art Right Now
YIKES.
I have to tell this robot very specifically that not every man in New York City is a white guy?!
Surely if I just gently specify that he is not Caucasian and is in New York City I’ll see gentlemen who look more like our some of our friends IRL. Sure we know plenty of white gentlemen but there are OTHER RACES YOU ROBOT.
I gently nudged the robot to draw some more men.
When I awkwardly prompted the robot to draw me a man who isn’t white in a very Awkward Millennial White Woman Discussing Race With A Robot way, the AI assumed I must only be thinking of portraits of:
Men of African ancestry only
A man whose face did not show the emotion written in the very first line of the description
Now, look at the facial expressions on all of those men’s faces. They’re not really emoting — they’re just standing there in the scene. Compare that to these images of a woman who looks like me:
The emotion I told the AI to draw for all of these images was:
“Hope triumphing over adversity”
The robot has no idea how to draw a man like you with that kind of emotion. I can get my favorite AI tool to imagine worlds that do not exist in gorgeous and fantastical detail, like this:
But when I asked the same robot to draw an emotional portrait of a friend like you, the robot cannot imagine it.
My magnificently failed attempts to generate your portrait illustrate two crucial ideas. Those ideas keep coming up in conversations with you and other men in my life. Since many of my friends — but especially you Rasheed — have encouraged me to write, this blog post is for you.
Let’s start with (Big Important Idea #1):
Our culture doesn’t know how to picture many emotions expressed on a man’s face. The concept is quite literally unimaginable to a miraculous machine trained on countless internet comments. Our collective online imagination does not really understand that men feel the full spectrum of human emotions.
Boys Don’t Cry
The Cure, 1979
& also: American culture, 1776-present
Gender starts shaping our stories before we even learn to speak. One of the things that hurts me to imagine is what it’s like to be a little boy in many cultures.
There are a lot of things I HATED about growing up as a girl. By mentioning one set of issues I’m not trying to imply that Team Pink has fewer problems than Team Blue.
If I try to address all the societal problems I care about in a single blog post, the word count would be absolutely brutal. it'd be a blog post so long it would probably count as a hatecrime! ten billion paragraphs!!! perhaps the internet would explode?!
anyway: the topic of this post is men's mental health so i will be focusing on cisgender dudes in america. 
We learn to act according to our assigned gender roles when we’re young. Many of my male friends say they were “not supposed” to cry as kids.
When I ask, usually they say the first time they remember that phrase was in elementary school. First grade maybe. Some men I know say that they learned that crying was always forbidden even earlier than that.
Now I was taught never to cry in a lot of situations when I was little. My parents told me a lot about how dangerous the world was — but it was always okay for me to cry in front of my dad. In one of my psychology classes, I learned that statistically that wasn’t true for many men growing up.
In 2005, a team of psychology researchers studied a group of 60 families playing a playground game. All of the children were between ages 2 and 6.
The researchers discovered that fathers were more likely to pay attention to their sons when the boys expressed anger compared to sadness. Even in similar situations — for example, when a child got visibly upset after losing a game — dads were more likely to comfort boys who acted angrily. Fathers were also more likely to soothe daughters who expressed sadness than daughters who showed anger or frustration.
Research on the science of socialization says that boys learn very strict codes around what kinds of painful emotions are allowed. Here I think I should clarify that I know research reflects general but not always individual data.
✅ My point is: society rewards anger but not sadness in male human beings
🚫 But I don’t want to imply: therefore man = always angry
Here I checked in with my consulting Editor again. Might as well run this by a source who has real first-hand experience with this whole “being a man in America” thing. He agreed that many factors reinforce expressing negative feelings as anger for guys, but added that life is more complicated than just what gets published in academic articles.
Josh, Editor and Believer in The Existence of Nuance
“I never really had to change my behavior or who I am around my family. It’s true in a lot of families, but not all of them.
For a lot of men, even the more privileged, well-off-men… A lot of that behavior is passed on from a father. Or lack thereof. I don’t think it’s always influenced by an older masculine figure.
It’s a sum of different reactions that you get. From men, women, your family, your culture. A lot of people do what they need to do to survive. I think that’s why a lot of men develop habits like that.”
That’s important to note. Not all families impose gender roles on their kids exactly the way this (or any) research study finds. Even when gender roles show up it’s not always about cramming children into the mold that individual parents want. Ideas about gender bombard us from every direction: we learn them at home, at school, with our friends, and from what we see in our media.
The internet loves to repeat phrases. One of those phrases is “toxic masculinity.” I think it’s important to talk about how gender roles can cause harm. But just because masculinity can become toxic doesn’t mean it always is.
American ideals of masculinity emphasize strength, competence, and bravery. Those are all admirable qualities. Problems begin when those positive qualities become enforced to such a degree that they alienate us from other aspects of ourselves.
The positive masculine ideal of a strong man may become distorted into the expectation that men cannot show weakness. This can become extremely harmful in many ways. When it comes to men’s mental health, strength can warp into silence. Our culture equates feelings with femininity.
One of the most poignant studies I’ve read analyzed how often young people smile. A study compared the yearbook photos of more than 18,000 Michigan students, beginning in kindergarten and ending in the 12th grade.
In kindergarten, boys smiled in their photos as often as girls did. Gender differences began emerging in the sixth grade. By the time students reached their senior year, young men appeared unsmiling in their yearbook portraits far more often than young women did.
Me, Writer Incapable of Concise Writing
“Oh no! I’m generating a ridiculously long post! Why does this always happen? 😿
Ugh. Right. I’m trying to summarize all of the interesting research I’ve read. Only there is a lot of fascinating stuff and I want to talk about all of it and… oh god. SO MANY WORDS.
Okay. FOCUS. This blog post is for my friend Rasheed. What’s another big idea I simply have to honestly address here? We’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about gender and society and… Aha - yes. I am going to have to talk about race in America.
It’s time for (Big Important Idea #2):
America sends messages about what emotions are forbidden. Those messages are so clear that most children recognize them circa age 12. Not all boys internalize every cultural message. Statistically, many of them do.
Our culture rewards boys for expressing anger. Boys grow up into men. Those men encounter a society that views them as hostile. Many men, regardless of how “angrily” they act, are automatically seen as dangerous.
Men, Dangerous By Default
As a future therapist, I don’t think I can write an honest discussion of men’s mental health without talking about how our society systematically harms people.
The study about yearbook photos discovered significant differences in how much boys and girls smiled. When that study analyzed its data according to the students’ racial backgrounds, another clear trend emerged:
African American boys presented the strongest difference from all other groups, smiling significantly less compared to both groups of girls and the European American boys.
-Taylor Wondergem & Friedlmeier, 2012
In kindergarten, all children smiled at about the same rate in their yearbook portraits. By their senior year, young Black men smiled in their pictures far less frequently than any other group of students.
The researchers concluded their written summary with a few possible explanations for the results. I respect their academic analysis but now I’d rather quote a personal essay I found. The author describes how his experiences of racism as a Black man in America impacted his mental health:
“To face the world, Black men have to arm themselves with various self-preservation and self-defense tools, and participate in emotional martial arts just to prove they deserve to exist… In media, culture, and film, Black men are frequently told to ‘man up,’ that showing emotion is ‘soft,’ and that ‘real’ men don’t cry.”
- Vaughn Stafford Gray, There Is No Sympathy for Black Men Struggling with Mental Health
“Emotional martial arts” is an evocative phrase. One of the first things you learn in any combat sport is what to do if you absolutely know you cannot dodge an incoming punch. You don’t fight the punch. You just try to relax to minimize the physical damage of the strike.
Just as students in martial arts learn to take a punch, the young men who stopped smiling in photos learned to minimize the damage of a world that sees them as frighteningly different. By high school, students understand that they cannot share many details of their emotional realities.
Like Josh said earlier: “A lot of people do what they need to do to survive.”
Rasheed, sometimes we talk about how strangers automatically assume that you are dangerous just because of how you look.
Now Rasheed: based on your first name and my misadventures with AI art, readers who don’t know you might assume that you are my friend who happens to be Black.
When psychologists study race, they sometimes compare “Black” and “white” with no other races analyzed. In that yearbook study, the researchers addressed a fact that many published studies don’t talk about:
Because the sample was a convenience sample, the results are not entirely generalizable… Many of the yearbooks obtained were from predominantly European American or predominantly African American schools.
- Wondergem & Friedlmeier, 2012
A convenience sample is researcher-speak for the best data we could get at the time. The data reflects the fact that many American schools in Michigan in 2012 were still “predominantly European American” or “predominantly African American” — racially segregated in practice if not in name. Students of other racial identities were primarily “Hispanic or Asian” but those photos were not included in the analysis. There were not enough data points to run the same statistical tests to the accepted scientific standards.
Rasheed, I’ve given my AI Art algorithms very general Millennial White Woman directions on how to draw your portrait. You usually describe yourself as Indian when you draw funny/unusual/slightly confusing memes in our friends’ group chat.
SCREENSHOT FROM OUR GROUPCHAT:
Rasheed describes Rasheed to Meta AI
Rasheed says: “angry bearded muscular Indian man”
Meta AI draws: this shirtless guy
Garfield the cat emerges from the 2d dimensional universe of his original cartoon. He is a weird 3D cat with no lasagna.
This image feels like a Monday to me.
As a white woman writing on the internet, I don’t want to gloss over the idea that Black men face difficulties that are both specific and universal. I think that our culture is still so hesitant to honestly engage with the topic of race that Asian students, Hispanic students, Southeast Asian students, vanished from that study.
I was going to try and tell the ai that technically one of your parents is from India and one is from South america
but Josh said, “Just use whatever adjective rasheed uses.”
---> And so: we’re moving on.
---> I did try to train the ai algorithm to understand that biracial and multiracial people exist. i'm not sure if i succeeded but i eventually got the robot to draw me dwayne "the rock" johnson. Rasheed, you and I are both big fans of the author bell hooks. I cannot offer a thought more beautiful than the one she wrote in All About Love.
“Life-threatening nihilism abounds in contemporary culture, crossing the boundaries of race, class, gender, and nationality. At some point it affects all our lives. Everyone I know is at times brought low by feelings of depression and despair about the state of the world.”
- bell hooks, All About Love
And here we arrive at (Big Important Point #3): Therapy should be a space where everyone feels comfortable talking about what’s on their mind. Right now, it isn’t. Mental health professionals talk about how social stigma deters men who need help, but we don’t talk enough about how the therapy discourages men from speaking up.
Now, back to my friend Rasheed. Good heavens this is a long post, isn’t it? It’d be shorter if I weren’t also trying to educate the mental health field on an issue we both care about. Since we’re both avid readers, Rasheed, I know you know that writing for two audiences at the same time is a very tricky business.
I’m writing this blog for both:
1.) My dear friends and family
To show them that they are wise and have taught me important things. Sometimes I feel compelled to show research evidence of how scientifically verified my friends’ takes are.
2.) The mental health profession
I am now part of a professional community dedicated to mental healthcare. I think it is my duty to tell my field that they need to do better for my friends.
@Rasheed, you can scroll past this section until you see another picture of a cat wearing a pirate hat. You’re welcome to read it for entertainment purposes but none of this information will be new to you. This part is written to educate any future or current therapists who still think:
"There’s nothing that we can do to change the fact that men don’t go to therapy! That’s just how things are!”
@CC Josh here as well. It might be weird to read your own words. I already asked you directly to answer the question:
Why Don’t Men Go To Therapy?
Hello therapists, future therapists, and other mental health professionals. 👋🏻
I’m happy you’re reading this. Maybe you realized this phenomenon long before I published this blog post. Please understand that I am only offering critique because I believe that the profession can improve. Let’s talk about a little mystery, shall we?
“Why don’t men go to therapy?” One of the great modern mysteries of the field. Or at least it’s talked about that way in far too many conversations I’ve heard.
Sometimes the person asking the question backpedals a little bit when she remembers that gay and bisexual men exist. Statistically, it is true that heterosexual men are the folks least likely to try counseling.
I just asked a man why men don’t go to therapy.
My Editor’s full remarks deserve their own article; this topic will have an official Part II. For now, I think I can summarize why the mental health profession needs to change based on a short excerpt of a long conversation Josh and I had.
Josh, Editor & Also A Man
“For a lot of social reasons, therapy may be more accessible to women.
What I keep hearing is ‘Men won’t go to therapy’ and that’s not true for a lot of the guys that I know. They show up and then they’re told that the problem is them. Men don’t know how to communicate. The field seems disinterested in learning how to talk to men.
I would say it’s up to the professionals. You’re the one with experience. You’re the one with authority. It’s your responsibility to see that this person can get the help that they need.”
Let me begin by saying that I learned many lessons about how inequality shapes a field by working as a woman in a male-dominated industry. Before I went to grad school, I worked for years in the tech industry.
Many women I talk to ask how I survived for so long in a field that is currently about 73% men. I won’t go into details of both my best and worst experiences at work, but I saw what happens to the professional discourse when only one gender dominates the conversation.
Men wield the balance of power in the world outside of the therapy world. Inside the counseling room, women decide who is mentally healthy and who is not. 75% of all mental health counselors are cisgender women.
Not all therapists identify as feminists. Most of us agree that American ideas of gender have evolved since the 1950s and 1960s.
I found this advertisement in an article about “12 Outrageously Sexist Vintage Ads.”
Top 3 Really Bad Ideas I See Here:
1.) There are many reasons to wear a bra. This is just the most straight man-centric use.
2.) The most important thing a woman can do is cater to the desires of a millionaire she has never even met.
3.) Ultimately, the message is that women should change themselves in order to be worthy of love.
Now on the one hand, it’s just an ad. And yet our culture is enforced by many tiny messages that make up the world around us. Here is a message screaming to women that their bodies are not good enough now. They will only be worthy when they successfully meet an ideal created by men. PUSH UP THOSE MAMMARIES, YOU FEMALES, AND MAYBE THEN YOU’LL BE LOVED!
This is how a popular therapist talks about men’s mental health on social media. I saw this on my feed while casually browsing Instagram.
A licensed therapist replied to a man normalizing therapy by saying that going to therapy is “the new 6’4.”
1.) There are many reasons men might go to therapy. This is the most straight woman-centric concern possible.
2.) The message is that men should cater to the desires of women they’ve never met.
3.) This therapist says that men should change themselves via therapy. Because going to therapy is the new version of being 6’4. Get it, boys?
The Message: Nice point about how medical care is seen as a “sign of weakness” for people like you. NOW HERE IS A JOKE ABOUT WHY YOU’RE NOT TALL ENOUGH! TEEHEE! :)
Therapists are talking about therapy like a lingerie company in 1964 talked about pushup bras.
Here I am not objecting to a comment that any individual woman made on her personal social media. I am saying that I don’t think it’s okay for such an influential therapist to publicly make this joke in reply to a serious-sounding post a man made on the topic of men’s mental health.
I accept that it is a joke. I argue that jokes are supposed to be funny. Cruelty eclipses comedic potential when a mental health professional minimizes other people’s mental health. Let me hand the microphone back over to Josh, because he offered a more diplomatic explanation than I can:
Josh, Editor and Most Consistently Diplomatic Person I Know:
“Why is that the first reaction? Women make assumptions about who a man is based on his height. I’ve known very charismatic short guys. Guys who could talk to anyone, make friends with anyone, and yet still had so many issues with women. Women would just bring that up to their faces. It’s fine to tell a man you’re not interested with no explanation — you don’t have to remind a short guy that he is short. Men do this too, assuming that a if a woman is pretty she’s a bad person. It’s demeaning either way.
But for it to bleed into the opinions of a medical professional? That’s… I don’t know. It reduces people to the things that they can’t control.”
Therapy’s dismissive attitude towards men’s mental health compounds the social stigma that men already experience.
It’s such a common problem that it shows up before a person even starts therapy. Here is what I see when I search for a new therapist on PsychologyToday.com. The only variable I will change in my own experiment is what kind of Gender Issues I’m looking to discuss.
Let’s do a search. Pretend that I am looking for some extra guidance. Let’s say I’m in a good place in life. Counseling can help both folks with serious mental health concerns and people going through life challenges.
Here is what I see if I am just searching for some extra guidance. I sometimes want to talk about topics that are specific to being a woman.
as YOU Might have guessed from my rant about sexist advertising, sometimes i really need to talk about issues facing women in america.Women’s Issues Therapists in New York City tell me:
Women’s Issues Therapists at the $$ price point ($90-130/hour) tell me that:
Therapy is where therapists “strive to provide a safe space for you to explore your thoughts, feelings, and past without fear of being judged or invalidated.”
Another therapist assures me that “throughout your life, you will continue to evolve as an individual.”
Problems that bring people to therapy might be “complex trauma” or “low self-esteem.” Some of the keywords I see don’t necessarily reflect my life but I get the message that all kinds of people attend therapy.
Message: Therapy is normal and I can get better.
Here is what Josh sees when he searches for therapists at the same budget. He’s looking to talk about exploring his identity as a guy in his 20s and nourishing healthy relationships with his family — you know, being a man.
Men’s Issues Therapists in New York City tell him:
Men’s Issues Therapists at the $$ price point ($90-130/hour) tell Josh that:
Therapy for men’s studies emphasizes “pornography/sexual addiction.” That concern deserves respectful treatment but I wonder why it’s one of the first things said when it comes to men’s issues.
Therapy addresses “relationship health for married couples” and “behavioral issues” plus some diagnoses that sound very serious. Maybe therapy is only for serious mental illnesses? Or men who don’t know how to talk to their wives?
There are a few keywords suggesting that other topics can come up. “School Issues” and “Self Esteem” are there, but those terms are buried beneath more memorable phrases about “Bipolar Disorder” and “Borderline Personality.”
Josh receives a very different message: Therapy addresses many issues, but most of the words describe stigmatized disorders and men who don’t understand women. To me, the most memorable phrases are “pornography/sexual addiction” and “behavioral issues.” And also: the first therapist who shows up on his results page is not accepting new clients right now.
Many clinicians in New York City offer excellent and sensitive care regardless of gender. Despite that fact, this was the message I saw when I searched for therapists one random day in January. This article already discussed the limitations of convenience samples. Feel free to replicate this experiment for yourself by searching on Psychology Today.
To a scientist, that is just one day’s worth of data gathered for free. To me, it’s an important message. That’s what showed up on Psychology Today on the day when Josh told me he was interested in trying therapy.
A 2013 study in Australia found that most young men are willing to talk about mental health. They just don’t trust therapists to have those conversations with them.
When researchers surveyed 483 men ages 16-24, the study participants made many of the same points that Josh told me:
Participants displayed a range of negative attitudes in relation to mental health professionals… Participants generally expressed low trust and lack of confidence in professionals’ maintaining confidentiality and ability to actually help.
When they needed help, these men felt most comfortable trying to find information for themselves. The “anonymity” and relevance of online resources matched the more “action-oriented” attitude that most participants expressed. There was a “strong willingness for young men to use the Internet to find mental health information and support.”
These men offered exact instructions on how the counseling profession can change in order to meet their needs.
“When asked what would make a professional more appealing participants felt they should be “down to earth” (eg. “not use big, medical words”), non-judgemental and have experienced a mental health problem themselves.”
Ellis et al, 2013
What the Statistics Say
I’ve read many articles on men’s mental health before writing my own blog post. Other articles often begin with statistics. Those statistics enumerate many men turn to violence and how often men develop substance abuse issues. More often than not, writers include death statistics as evidence of a quiet epidemic. I hesitate to include any painful numbers and yet I feel as if I must in order to convince the mental health field to care.
39,255 men committed suicide in the United States in 2022.
Year after year, men outnumber women in the suicide statistics at about a ratio of 4:1.
There is one more statistic you should know: According to the CDC, approximately 24.7% of cisgender women seek therapy per year. Only about 13.4% of cisgender men do. Ideals of masculinity and systemic barriers to healthcare make it harder for men to seek help. The mental health profession itself is also making men feel unwelcome.
Me, Editing This Article
"This is a difficult topic to talk about. I should take a break.
How about I check out the ol’ social media? Bet other people on the Therapists forum are complaining about the professional requirement to own 20 Neutral Therapist Cardigan Sweaters again, that’ll be funny.
Wait. What? Here’s a very nice post by a polite therapist mentioning the exact same issue that I’m writing a blog post about. WEIRD. Holy smokes - 288 comments?!?”
Sorry if me and my AI tool depicted you as a different race than you are, Anonymous 43 y/o male therapist. I didn’t specify a race, just told the AI “Thoughtful man” and the picture was this guy.
Men as a broad demographic are so underserved by therapy that an experienced clinician is out there asking on the internet:
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing or is it just me?”
288 comments. Reading them vividly reminded me of being in the tech industry again.
When we talked about working in tech companies, every once in a while a woman gently described issues facing our gender. A debate erupted. There were both male feminist allies and men who made comments I found deeply unhelpful. A conversation about social change collapsed under the weight of an increasingly personal argument.
That pattern, flipping the pink and the blue, is exactly what is happening on a gentle question offered a few days ago on a well-moderated forum for practicing therapists.
I won’t quote anonymous comments I’ve read. I also won’t list absurdly broad generalizations I’ve heard said aloud in professional conversations recently.
Please let me simply say that I am not asking any individual woman to ignore harm that has been done to her. I am not diminishing the fact that many therapy clients come to counseling after sexual violence, harassment, and relationships that damaged their self-worth. I am asking mental health professionals to recognize that we are collectively sending a message that some people who are struggling are unwelcome in therapy. And that, my demographically similar colleagues, is a problem.
My fellow mental health professionals, we officially have a problem.
We have a problem so severe that students in the sixth grade stop smiling in their yearbook photos.
The issues that face young Black men in America are many. Therapy cannot directly remedy every injustice in our nation.
Therapists can create a space where people experiencing injustice feel safe to talk about it.
We have a problem so critical that 39,255 men committed suicide in the year 2022. Suicide is now the #2 leading cause of death among men under the age of 44.
To me, that statistic is not just a number. Many years ago, someone I cared about was another point in the annual count of male suicides.
As a graduate student who is not yet a therapist, I am not sure if it is appropriate for me to say who that man was to me. Please understand that I grieved that loss in therapy beginning more than a decade ago.
The two men named in this post - Josh and Rasheed - are not in my mind at risk of “becoming a statistic.” They are resilient people with loving friends and family. Rasheed is a strong person who is also balanced and kind. He’s told me that he found an excellent therapist quite some time ago. I still believe that the field could show him more clearly that he is welcome. I am sad that Josh, who seriously is the most almost unrealistically sweet human being ever, is getting that message from the field I joined out of professional passion.
Please understand that I am not becoming a therapist as a crusade against the loss I experienced as a teenager. That is a Hollywood narrative and I am an ordinary woman in New York. I am becoming a therapist because therapy helped me heal long ago. I believe in the profession because once a professional believed in me.
My classes teach me that it is difficult to help therapy clients accept that change is possible. As a profession, we too have the power to change.
Each point in a statistic holds a story.
The end of any life that should have had a chance to flourish in dignity is a loss.
What happens to a country’s mental health when the medical providers who treat the mind signal to half the population that they are unwelcome?
What if the mental health field tried harder to listen?
I understand that therapists are not saviors who must rescue every single person in crisis. No matter how hard we try, some lives will be lost.
I am not demanding miracles. I am saying that we can all send a different message.
As a profession, we have the power to help. Change is always possible.
As Josh said,
“You’re the one with experience. You’re the one with authority.”
Why I Have Hope
Despite every difficult statistic I described, I have hope that our world can change.
I used “can” rather than “will” very deliberately. We face a challenging moment of history now. No reader needs me to explain that fact.
@Rasheed, you survived an incredibly long scroll! Nice to see you again.
Sorry about all of those paragraphs up there. I was trying to convince a profession to change.
Now let’s get back to the part where I talk about you. And the idea that I tried to convey through the AI portrait of you at the very start of this post:
“A feeling of hope triumphing over adversity”
@Josh , congratulations, we wrote a book!
Despite how dark our moment of history is, and all the stigma surrounding mental health for men, I believe that things can get better.
Masculinity doesn’t have to be about men exerting power over women. That was true through most of history but we are not doomed to live that way forever. My friend Rasheed and I talk about how a book by bell hooks called All About Love taught us a conscious form of optimism. Reading her work years ago helped me realized that strict gender expectations constrict us all. Our culture teaches us to fear one another rather than love our fellow human beings.
“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”
-bell hooks, All About Love
Rasheed, we’ve talked about how reading this book helped us both decide that the world could get better. I remember most vividly how you talked about how her writing influenced how you see masculinity. For me readin bell hooks changed how I see being a woman, how I try to think about race, how I see social power, and what I want from life.
I believe that things can always get better. My friends helped me see that change is always possible. Together, we hope.
I am writing about mental health now because my friends encouraged me. The biggest writing fan I know is Rasheed and he is also one of the most passionate mental health advocates I’ve met. I still need to draw a picture of him to give this post the grand finale it deserves.
And now that we’re on that topic, I can finally talk about AI art again!
Me, Drawing Pictures Using A Robot
How do I draw my friend Rasheed?
I feel like what we have in common is the fact that we faced some tough times in life, chose to redefine who we want to be, and learned to be stronger.
That’s the feeling. But what’s the look?
Oh wait. Hang on. What does Rasheed really like? PIRATES.
I was getting stuck on this idea that I had to draw our friends exactly as they are. We are all living in New York City so I drew the first batch of portraits there. But hey: what if we were pirates?
Here, Rasheed, is my version of the feeling that defines our friendship. I have yelled at an AI art bot until it created this pirate ship expressing the emotion of:
“Hope triumphing over adversity”
That is what I see as our greatest strength. It is also the message I want to send about mental health to men.
But I still couldn’t get the AI art tool to draw you, Rasheed, as a pirate looking hopeful and happy.
Me, Drawing Pictures Using A Robot
“I REFUSE TO GIVE UP!
I will deprogram the idea that men cannot show feelings!
I will unpack all the biases encoded by infinity-plus-one anonymous online comments!
There has to be a way… Wait. Hang on. I have an editor.
I should just (BEEP)-ing ask Josh.”
Josh, Most Patient Human Being On The Planet
“Have you tried telling the algorithm to use specific artists’ work? If you just give it general visual directions it will only really reference the most popular works online.
Okay. So, let’s see. You used a lot of painters. And a lot of art styles but they’re all fine art painters. Mostly European dudes. Maybe try some artists from other countries? I’ve gotten Bing’s AI to make really decent manga-style art.”
(insert joke about me being the last person on the internet to discover anime.)
i was indeed only using painters we learned about in my art classes.
oops. That was the problem.Up until this point, I’d only been using visual styles from America and Europe. Feeding many different fancy painters I learned in my fine art classes into an algorithm produced images that didn’t really express the ideas I wanted to show.
Katsuya Terada is a manga artist and character designer. His work conveyed a lot of of emotion to me regardless of the subject of the art itself. The three images above are all his original work.
Terada draws inspiration from artists in France, China, Korea and his home country of Japan. Modern visual media has to directly convey emotion in order to communicate. Classical Western traditions of art heavily feature abstract visual language of brushstrokes, evocative lighting, and primarily Christian imagery.
Here’s one of the illustrations I generated when I started blending Terada’s work in with my formula for making pictures.
The emotion I wrote in is both:
How our culture socializes men to describe emotions in terms of anger
The sadness, loneliness, regret or doubt the men I know often describe when I ask them about a bad day they had
Expressing emotions does not have to be imagined as inherently feminine. It takes some extra work to reimagine an idea, but it can be done.
Here is the idea of facing a difficult time being shown as strength.
It’s getting to be a better portrait of Rasheed: my tall friend with a beard who is also a powerlifter with a wicked cool t-shirt collection.
We can learn from the way past generations lived. We can write our own story now.
Here I almost drew our favorite author. I realized that instead I should try to draw the woman you described as your “ol’ battle-axe of a Mom.”
It is to me a very wonderful way of describing a brave woman with great affection.
Here is a portrait of Rasheed The Pirate.
We became friends from talking about what a tough couple of years it’s been here in New York. Rasheed is my friend who believes that hope is a skill we can learn to grow.
Pirate translation:
YARR, we became shipmates from yammerin’ about how life on land be full of perils. Now there be fair skies up ahead.
I dedicate this blog to all my friends and the people who inspired me.
To Rasheed, the most stalwart believer in hope I know.
To Josh, who decided to love me even though he saw the fears I thought made me unloveable. (@ Josh - You seemed a little surprised when I told you I thought you were a wonderful writer. Most writers need someone to pester them to write — my mom read a rough draft of this piece and likes your sections the most.)
To my mom, who believes in doing the right thing. (She also believes in justice. Guess that makes her an old-school social justice warrior? Maybe my mom is an ol’ battle-axe too.) She believed very long ago that I could get better. Whatever the statistics said about young people like I used to be, she had hope that I would grow up happy and wild and free.
You know. Like a pirate.
Cheers, pirates.
Here’s to everyone who believes in getting better.
P.S. Yes that is josh in the captain's hat. he's the editor. Every writer needs an editor so he gets to wear the hat.
that's not a patriarchy thing.
that's me admitting that if i didn't have an editor then this blog would go on forever. i would actually starve to death in front of the keyboard and never publish anything.