Why guys don’t like to go to shrinks

Articles like this one, How Men Can Stay Mentally Fit, bug the hell out of me, even when they’ve got good things to say.

On the one hand, these experts are all saying that men have a harder time than women when it comes to seeking help for the problems in their lives. And then they and the author of the article proceed to talk about this in a way that alienates most guys. Here are a few gems:

• “Specialists see some common threads in the causes of emotional stress among men. Many experts believe that some mental problems stem from how men are treated by society.”

  Translation: Your emotional stress is a mental problem and it’s caused in part by how society treats you.
  What guy wants to hear that he’s got a mental problem? And what guys wants to hear that he’s a victim of society?

• “Mental health problems are massively under-diagnosed in men.”
  Translation: Too many of us are sick in the head and not being diagnosed correctly by the helping professions.
  Makes you just want to march on Washington DC to fight for equity, doesn’t it?

• “Men are more likely to show psychological distress in overt, external ways.”
  Translation: Your misbehavior is really a sign of psychological stress.

  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have my problematic behavior labled bad, stupid, wrong, or even weak than “psychological distress.”

In the movie Dragonfly, Kevin Costner plays a typical tough guy doctor who’s having a hard time dealing with his wife’s death. He’s buttonholed by a woman psychologist at a dinner party who tells him in new agey lingo that he needs her help to aid him in the grieving process. His response? Something to the effect of “I don’t need a damn shrink crawling up my ass with a flashlight to tell me what’s going on.” Right on, I thought at the time. The vast majority of magazine articles and books aimed at the problems of men make it more unlikely that men will seek help for those problems. And movie scenes like this reinforce it.

One quote in the article got closer to describing a problem in a more palatable way:

• “For a lot of men, the so-called ‘midlife crisis’ is the result of living an unexamined life and suddenly, after years of hard work, feeling trapped.”
  Translation: You can get trapped by your own unexamined life.
  That’s wording I can relate to.