Like, why is it so widespread, what causes it, what solutions are available, etc. I don’t really know how to ask this question so I hope I’m making sense
Like, why is it so widespread, what causes it, what solutions are available, etc. I don’t really know how to ask this question so I hope I’m making sense
Explain to me in actual words what a therapist is going to accomplish.
“Doctor doctor you’ve got to do something! Third spaces don’t exist, there’s no loitering signs everywhere you’ll be arrested for standing around talking, everyone my age had kids and their lives fell off, bars charge $9.50 for an ounce of bourbon and expect a tip and they play Nickelback loud enough to be heard from the moon so I’ve just been sitting at home alone drinking diet soda and playing Subnautica over and over again and while I utterly love this game it’s getting a little stale and Below Zero isn’t…good at all? So I guess I’m a little bored.”
“…Here’s a prescription for an SSRI, that’ll be $900.”
Lots of men aren’t taught emotional intelligence and therapy is helpful for better identifying your emotions so your choices can actually have impactbon them.
I take it you didn’t read and process the rest of my comment?
I’m very aware of the strawman, you specifically asked for an answer. Those are real issues, but you asked how a therapist could help.
I was a pilot one or two careers ago, so I’m going to put it this way:
Feelings are liabilities, not assets. You launch an Airbus out of Newark and a few hundred feet up you hit more geese than your engines can take leaving you out of thrust, low on altitude and low on options, the emotional decision is to curl up on the floor and snot cry because you’re now in more danger than nature designed you to handle.
On occasion you’ll find cases where pilots do lock up like that. The kindest thing anyone will ever say about those pilots is “The primary cause of the accident was pilot error.”
Now listen to how they talk about Captain Sully. “He’s so calm. There’s no emotion in his voice, he just started working the problem.” Stopping to identify exactly which crayola crayon color exactly matched his emotional state in that moment wasn’t going to lengthen any lives; starting the APU and configuring the airplane for best glide did though. You stay in your feelings, you start doing stupid irrational things, you’re gonna die for sure. You push all of that down to your ass where it can be safely clenched out of the way and you THINK.
Having feelings is how you fuck up when your decisions matter the most. Getting rid of them is the useful skill, not giving each one a Baskin Robbins 31 flavors marketing name.
You repress your feelings and wonder why you’re lonely. You don’t realize how much they impact your life until you know how to recognize them, I myself went through that too. It wasn’t until I learned more about my emotions that I truly felt happy, wanted. Repressing feelings doesn’t work, not in a social setting, because you repress all your emotions, even the positive ones.
As someone who works in mental health I’m actually with you but first I need to clarify that therapists don’t prescribe meds, psychiatrists do. Therapists usually have at least a bachelor’s usually a masters in one of a couple non-medical (or better stated, medical-adjacent) fields. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who completed full medical school and a residency specializing in psychiatry. Even a doctorate in psychology is not a medical doctor. A therapist is going to talk to you and provide one of two basic functions: allowing you to vent / express your emotions to a completely supportive person, and teach social skills and emotional intelligence. Psychology = talking, psychiatry = drugs. This is an important distinction because while talk therapy is often more helpful than medications for certain disorders, it’s a lot more expensive to pay for an hour human emotional presence than having a doctor (even with their more specialized knowledge) listen for fifteen minutes then decide which neurotransmitters are maybe involved the most and picking a chemical from a list to throw at the problem and see what sticks.
Now even with therapy being more helpful for certain things, I don’t think it’s actually a good solution (or again, better-stated, a good long term solution). It’s definitely going to help with this kind of problem because the core issue is largely behavioral, not neurochemical, but first of all it’s putting our emotional wellness in the hands of capitalism which is… terrible. I cannot express how much that idea terrifies me. But second of all, as someone who’s actually had 300h of therapy for a personality disorder, it starts to lose efficacy over time due to a lack of true emotional intimacy.
Once you know the DBT manual front to back plus 100h of general psycheducation on pavlov and maslow, they’re not really doing skills teaching anymore, they’re just listening to you bitch. And listening to you bitch is… fine, especially if you wouldn’t have a safe place to do that at all otherwise. But even that starts to lose efficacy when you start feeling like they have no idea what you’re actually talking about. I realized this recently when I had an extremely stressful experience at work and the therapist was like,“yeah that sucks” but my work friends were all like,“oh yeah she was waaay out of line you did exactly the right thing” because my therapist knew my account, but my coworkers knew more sides of the story and still sided with me and that just… meant a lot more. Bitching also never actually solves the core issue if there is one, a bigger part of that situation was some underlying problems with my workload that my boss was refusing to address, and at a certain point even my coworkers listening to me bitch wasn’t cutting it either because whether they listened or not I knew I was going to get my head shoved right back under the water the second I walked back out on my unit and until that issue is actually fixed nothing will ever truly even touch the dread that is constantly hovering over you.
And finally the other core issue is that true emotional connection, the kind humans truly crave, is reciprocal. A therapist has boundaries to maintain that are actually pretty critical to the function of the therapeutic process. The relationship being a completely one-sided support is the whole point. It prevents the abuse of the relationship by someone who knows both more about the person and more about human behavior in general to a person who is emotionally vulnerable for one reason or another. Having those boundaries preserves what therapy does the most good for. But that also means it’s going to feel hollow after a while because in the long term what people truly need is reciprocity so they can feel the satisfaction of also helping the other person (in more ways than a monetary transaction). Therapy can help you learn more about how to build those relationships, but it can’t replace those relationships, not in the long term anyway. I even see this in my own patients, I’m having to constantly reinforce boundaries that they’re pushing not out of malice but just because they’re instinctually craving a deeper connection than I can safely offer for either of our sakes.
As a tangential note, another problem we run into in men’s mental health in particular, is the lack of men working in mental health. I’m kinda sorta trans but I was raised female which means I often lack the life experience to truly speak to a lot of men’s issues. We really need a lot more men who have successfully navigated some of these problems to take the lead towards better men’s mental health because they know what really needs to happen and what skills need to be taught. I got into my field in an effort to improve care for personality disorders because I saw what was lacking and felt it was important to provide my inside perspective on a poorly understood issue and something similar needs to happen for men. Another problem with that though is that men’s difficulty connecting with other men can often keep them from seeking support from a male professional. I’ve had lots of men say they’re more comfortable opening up to me but then they start asking about romantic and sexual topics which a) can be a huuuge boundary issue and b) I often just don’t have the information they REALLY need on the topic, which is how to approach the issues specifically as a man. But a lot of that could also (again) be alleviated by having more men working in mental health to increase the odds that someone will happen to create the necessary rapport (/professionally vibe with) with the patient.
Anyway I think you’re right, especially about the thirdspaces, but I do worry that people will be somewhat negatively reactive to the way you’ve expressed it here. When I’ve stated as much with this little background, even stating that my perspective is informed by extensive personal AND professional experience, I’ve had pretty much every layperson getting out their pitchforks.
Let’s put it another way:
“Why aren’t men using electrical appliances anymore?”
“Well, since the Republicans shut down Underwriter’s Labs 40 years ago they’re just too dangerous. A poll conducted by Pew Research in 2062 found only 30% of men between the ages of 20 and 40 have attempted to use a kitchen appliance and of those 30% none polled did so without being shocked, burned or lacerated. Of the men polled, none of them reported cooking indoors more than twice a year; they either exclusively seek food that requires no preparation or those who have access to the outdoors cook over wood fires. One in ten report eating canned or frozen food cold on at least a weekly basis.”
“There’s just nothing you can do to get men to seek mental health services, is there?”
How is individual talk therapy supposed to fix industry deregulation due to crony capitalism?
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I live in a town that is mostly a suburb of a military base. They’ve been cutting down as much forest as they can to cram in oversized McMansions to accomodate the influx of people moving out of the cities. Deer and raccoons have been running rampant in my neighborhood because their habitats out in the woods are being destroyed for subdivisions and shopping centers. The county recently failed to get the general assembly to budge on water restrictions on the two rivers the county government is authorized to pull water from, so they’re starting to pressure my town (which has its own waterworks that pulls from a different river than the county) to share ours. None of the people coming into the area are joining a community; none exists here. People here build tall opaque fences on their property lines and watch Netflix alone. There is no community, only a crowd.
And then a therapist is going to ask a stupid and unhelpful question like “How does that make you feel?”
My car doesn’t start most of the time and when it does it doesn’t run for very long, I’ve missed work three times last week alone because of car troubles, he’s threatening to fire me if I don’t get it right but I don’t have the money for a mechanic. “How does that make you feel?”
Feelings are the raw ore from which bad decisions are forged. How I fell is wrong and irrelevant. What am I supposed to DO?
I don’t think therapy can help everyone. I think it can help those who are (either knowingly or subconsciously) looking inward for solutions. For those of us that are fairly comfortable in our own skins and are frustrated by externalities, I don’t think therapy would be very productive. That said, at a personal level with the goal of self improvement I probably could be a little more introspective about some things but I’m not bothered enough to go to a therapist for it.
I’m reminded of Joe Shea. The one who was senior chief manager of something or other at NASA during the Apollo program. You can tell Joe was a good man from how he took the Apollo 1 fire: He wanted to kill himself. He struggled to live with the idea that three of his close friends, people who trusted him and his engineers, burned to death in a machine he had some responsibility for. The man who isn’t fucked up in that position doesn’t need to be in that position.
My understanding of history is he was sent to see some psychologists, and their remarks was “Joe is very smart.” I’ve been in the aviation industry myself and I’ve danced around issues of mental health. FAR 67 has some things to say about what mental health is and isn’t a federal offense to let your doctor to tell Oklahoma City. HAHAHAHAHA. Fuck.
That’s the peak of manliness right there; that’s a man who takes his responsibilities seriously, they guy who is completely wrecked by those three little words “They trusted me.” Or more to the point, the chore of adding the letters “ed” to “they trust me.” If the effort of lifting that suffix into place wouldn’t bend your soul, kindly get the fuck out of my aerospace industry.
This was in the mid 1960’s, the stigma of seeing a shrink was even louder back then. I’m not sure how it actually played out but in the docudrama From The Earth To The Moon, Joe Shea didn’t take the suggestion from Deke Slayton that he see a psychiatrist gently. According to Wikipedia he “outsmarted” them, giving the answers he knew they’d want to hear.
From my perspective it’s a perfectly good suggestion. If you’re in the shop running a tool and it throws a blue chip in your eye, you go see the ophthalmologist to get your eye fixed. If you have a heart attack you go to the cardiologist to get your heart fixed. The thing us technician types struggle with is medicine is a squishier science than we’re used to, and psychology is the squishiest among them, especially given the FAA’s idea of “Oh he’s not perfect? Kill his career forever.” HAHAHAHAHAAAAA. Fuck. “Hey, let’s make it illegal for pilots to receive treatment or be on medication for mental disorders.” “You mean let’s make it illegal to be a pilot while mentally ill?” “What’s the difference?” “Well the way you phrased it incentivizes pilots who think they have a problem to keep it to themselves and go untreated.” “pssh I guess but when is that ever going to happen.” HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA. Fuck.
I think the point I’m trauma dumping around is Joe Shea had suffered actual mental and emotional trauma and did need the attention of mental health professionals. That’s an appropriate use of therapy. And that it may be more productive to frame it as “injury” rather than “illness” in cases like this.
The average male member of the public right now, on the other hand, hasn’t had his psyche pushed in by the deaths of his friends that he’s at least partially responsible for. The average 20 something guy gained sentience in a world that said to him “We hate you, now pay for everything or else.” And to quote Rodney Dangerfield, “Fuck me? FUCK YOU!”