A New York Times article by Benedict Carey (May 21, 2011) titled "Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find," highlights the fact that men have been abandoning the psychotherapy field in droves for decades. So much so that the profession has now become almost totally dominated by female practitioners. According to Carey, less than 20% of Master's degrees in psychology, clinical social work or counseling are being sought by men today. Women outnumber men in doctoral psychology programs by a ratio of at least 3 to 1. (See an article published by the American Psychological Association on this remarkable development.) But this has not always been so. Certainly not when I was a graduate student back in the mid-1970s. What's happening to the psychotherapy profession? Why have men gradually deserted the field? And does gender really matter in psychotherapists?
I personally witnessed this insidious shift to a predominantly female demographic during my twenty years of teaching psychotherapy to graduate students.
A blogger adds:
Among the men who do go into counseling, at least from what I have seen here in Tucson, it seems a pretty large percentage of them are gay or bisexual. This should not even be an issue, but for traditionally masculine men it can be a serious issue, not to mention for those who are fundamentalist in their religious beliefs.I mentioned the NY Times article last year.
If psychotherapy were a real profession with established standards and procedures like orthopedic surgery, then maybe it would not matter if they were all female, gay, effeminate, neurotic, or Jewish. But it does matter. Psychotherapists cannot relate to a real man. They cannot empathize with him, and they have no evidence-based methodologies for advising him.
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