Finding the needle in the haystack might be hard, but it’s a whole hell of a lot less painful than the other way around.

Specifying that this is US contextualized because that’s the hellscape I am currently in.

Hi, I’m a person who works in healthcare who doesn’t identify as either a man or a woman, but I was socialised as the latter and I genuinely do not understand how society wants men to unpack their mental health conditions. Not only are there are the issues everyone has to deal with (not finding the right therapist, high costs, low availability, general mental health stigma, etc), there is a distinctly large set of big fuck off type hurdles in the way for men.

You have to break out of the traditionally harsh and punitive system of “acceptable masculinity” by even admitting you have a problem with your mental health (ie the “man up” barrier), you have to deal with the constant back and forth of the general “woke™️” crowd who tell you to not be toxically masculine and show your emotions while also not making other people around you into your therapist (ie the “fix your shit BUT NOT LIKE THAT but also I’m not going to tell you how other than by using go to therapy as an insult” barrier), and what I can only explain as the “other people have it worse” barrier, where if you are too far down on the oppression ladder (ie probably straight, white, cis male?), you somehow just can’t have any problems? And that’s just the ones I can think of, as a person who wasn’t socialised as a man, but has put effort (and I mean effort, I used to be a bit of a stereotypical man hater due to some trauma caused by men and being in the wrong predatory circles of feminism) into actually listening to men.

Just speaking from my own personal experience of currently trying to just find a therapist who won’t just inanely small talk at me for an hour, I’m having an incredibly rough go of it, and I don’t have any of those hurdles to clear. I’ve got a few of my own, but I don’t think the therapy stigma as a whole compares, not in the slightest. I feel that in most circles nowadays, if a woman is said to be in therapy, that realisation is either treated positively or at least neutrally, but a man would be viewed in a negative light.

Do you find that that’s the case? What’s your experience in seeking mental healthcare/trying to navigate mental health struggles as men?