APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys: apparently masculinity is a pathology to be cured...

boringcarpets · 2019-01-08T12:46:44+00:00

90% of psychologists under 35 are female.

anticathexis · 2019-01-08T16:39:25+00:00

I guess they raise a few good points. Men are limited by societal expectations and often in ways that are detrimental. The problem I see with this is that it is hugely ideological. The writers of these guidelines have found studies tha support an ideological narrative . The intersectional feminist conception of what men are and what men should be does not align with reality of men. I worry that these guidelines reflect a new set of expectations that men will be pressured to adhere to. These feminists don’t understand that men in general are tired of being told who to be, what to feel, how to behave. We are tired of our value being contingent upon our ability to fit the cultural script. I think the human expression of masculinity is undergoing a natural change, but what the ideologues fail to see is that masculinity will not be simply redefined in a manner that find palatable. Masculinity will reassert itself. This will occur as men continue to liberate themselves from the old expectations and begin to find their truth. The ideologues may like what men become and they may not. Either way, I will sleep easy.

Go your own way and help others to. We need you and we need you awake.

tenchineuro · 2019-01-09T00:49:19+00:00

For the first time ever, APA is releasing guidelines to help psychologists work with men and boys.

At first blush, this may seem unnecessary. For decades, psychology focused on men (particularly white men), to the exclusion of all others. And men still dominate professionally and politically: As of 2018, 95.2 percent of chief operating officers at Fortune 500 companies were men. According to a 2017 analysis by Fortune, in 16 of the top companies, 80 percent of all high-ranking executives were male. Meanwhile, the 115th Congress, which began in 2017, was 81 percent male.

This is totally irrelevant to literally everything.

But something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school—especially boys of color.

APA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men strive to recognize and address these problems in boys and men while remaining sensitive to the field’s androcentric past.

What the fork is that supposed to mean? And it's also irrelevant to literally everything.

Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.

Were there any non-feminist primary authors? I can't find a link to the guidelines in the article.

Many researchers who study femininity also work on masculinity: Several contributors to the guidelines for girls and women have also contributed to the new guidelines for boys and men.

What could possibly go wrong?

“Though men benefit from patriarchy, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” Levant was APA president in 2005 when the guideline-drafting process began and was instrumental in securing funding and support to get the process started.

So these are feminist guidelines invoking the all-powerful invisible hand of the patriarchy. How nice.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors. For example, a 2011 study led by Kristen Springer, PhD, of Rutgers University, found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 52, No. 2). And in 2007, researchers led by James Mahalik, PhD, of Boston College, found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco and avoiding vegetables, and to engage in these risky behaviors themselves (Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 64, No. 11).

It's not like society is geared to let men get health care, but they provide tons of free services for women.

And avoiding vegetables? Really?

“Because of the way many men have been brought up—to be self-sufficient and able to take care of themselves—any sense that things aren’t OK needs to be kept secret,” Rabinowitz says. “Part of what happens is men who keep things to themselves look outward and see that no one else is sharing any of the conflicts that they feel inside. That makes them feel isolated. They think they’re alone. They think they’re weak. They think they’re not OK. They don’t realize that other men are also harboring private thoughts and private emotions and private conflicts.”

It's not like there's any help available for men. But I bet this 'research' only gave the answers listed as choices, they never asked non-leading questions of men and studies what men's unrestricted answers.

These private conflicts can have tragic ramifications. Though men report less depression than women, they complete suicide at far higher rates than women, and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. The suicide rate for non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native men jumped 38 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; for white men, suicide rates increased 28 percent in that time span (National Center for Health Statistics, 2016

I think I see the problem now. But non-hispanic American Indian men don't live by American culture. They have their own. Is this an indictment against Indian culture?

Many of these problems seem intractable—how do you help someone who would never dream of seeking mental health treatment?—but psychologists have a key role to play, as the new guidelines lay out.

First, clinicians must be aware of dominant masculine ideals, and cognizant of their own potential biases. Second, they must recognize the integrated nature of masculinity, and how factors ranging from spirituality to ability status to age and ethnicity interact. Mental health professionals must also understand how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles. They should consider how stoicism and a reluctance to admit vulnerability hamstring men in personal relationships, and they should combat these forces, in part, by encouraging fathers to engage more fully with their children.

What power, privilege and sexism? The system discriminates against men and boys and denies them recourse.

The clinician’s role, McDermott says, can be to encourage men to discard the harmful ideologies of traditional masculinity (violence, sexism) and find flexibility in the potentially positive aspects (courage, leadership). He and his team are working on a positive-masculinities scale to capture peoples’ adherence to the pro-social traits expected from men, something that has yet to be measured systematically.

So traditional masculinity is about violence and sexism? Really?

I wonder what Jordan Peterson would say about this?

Getting that message out to men—that they’re adaptable, emotional and capable of engaging fully outside of rigid norms—is what the new guidelines are designed to do. And if psychologists can focus on supporting men in breaking free of masculinity rules that don’t help them, the effects could spread beyond just mental health for men, McDermott says. “If we can change men,” he says, “we can change the world.”

At which point they will be punished by our legal system and rejected by their wives. Will these shrinks help them then?

supersnakeah1w · 2019-01-08T12:49:05+00:00

Your headline is very deceptive. These guidelines, as I read them, don’t treat masculinity as a pathology. They identify some negative aspects of masculinity, while also highlighting aspects that are overstated. This shouldn’t threaten any person who can think for himself.

Title	APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys: apparently masculinity is a pathology to be cured...
Author	boringcarpets
Upvotes	12
Comments	10
Date	January 8, 2019 11:45 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/adtg0u/apa_issues_firstever_guidelines_for_practice_with/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/apa-issues-first-ever-guidelines-for-practice-with.886981 https://theredarchive.com/post/886981

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