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Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans

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  • Well if you give up before you start just because the existing options are shitty then that makes you part of the problem, doesn't it?

    dude, you are the problem.

    that's what you refuse to acknowledge. the problem is people like you, claiming that it's not your problem, and those awful men looking for help and advice should just 'go away'. because they upset you.

    this is precisely how rich people feel about the homeless. 'just go away, we don't like you, but we refuse to help you and your very existence is an offensive to us.'

  • Naturally. We were beaten up and ostracized if we showed weakness when we were kids. You CAN'T be sharing your feelings like that to another human.

    You can share them to fellow humans here now /c/reprieve@lemmy.zip

  • If I thought I deserved to live

    But you do, everyone deserves to live.

    Nobody deserves this kind of pain

  • Nobody deserves this kind of pain

    Agreed. I'm just saying you deserve to live. Whether you do should be your choice, not your doctor's or your government's.

  • Cool, I'm glad you're so enlightened and open minded as to uh ... not give a fuck about perspectives from places you aren't from.

    As for you telling me how to use an internet message board... what more do you want from me?

    I told you where I am from and what I am talking about.

    I'd love to be able to move to Europe and get away from this fucking imploding hell hole of morons.

    But I am broke and physically disabled after being the victim of numerous physical assaults.

    Are any of ya'll accepting disabled American aslyum seekers, so we can easily enjoy your civilized world?

    Didn't think so.

    Focus on fixing your country and making it a decent place to live. That way you don't need to go anywhere. That's what we've been doing for decades, and it works.

  • because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

    I've got no horse in this race but it appears that 'men should not be afraid to open up' articles and tweets were followed by 'men, we are not your therapist'.

    🤷♂

    I'm a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I've seen often:

    • Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
    • Man doesn't share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
    • Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
    • Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
    • Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
    • Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place

    It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It's not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it's precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don't have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can't afford therapy.

    If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It's a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who's committed to listening, caring, and not judging.

  • dude, you are the problem.

    that's what you refuse to acknowledge. the problem is people like you, claiming that it's not your problem, and those awful men looking for help and advice should just 'go away'. because they upset you.

    this is precisely how rich people feel about the homeless. 'just go away, we don't like you, but we refuse to help you and your very existence is an offensive to us.'

    Where is he saying it's not his problem? He's literally doing the exact opposite and making it his problem.

  • a lot of therapists and psychs are also useless for helping men. because they are women and they are basically only trained to deal with women's issues and only see women's emotional processes and processing as 'valid'. there is this default bias that men's emotional processing is 'flawed'.

    imo with mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion. i only had one therapist who actaully helped me was a man and that person helped me understand that 'not everything is your fault'. when all the other therapists/friends/family always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.

    the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.

    a woman can burst into tears over any little thing and everyone wants to help her. a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense and he should be thinking of how he is making other people feel.

    Pretty much every guy has had someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection. We are told to shut up and never talk about it again. Never, ever is he met with acceptance or love.

    Nonsense. The idea that all psychological issues are defined by gender is just the perspective of someone who's never made any meaningful progress through therapy and/or counseling. Mental health is not a gendered issue and the repetition of this misconception just leads more people to give up without even trying. Yes, the lens of sexual identity comes into play, mainly in terms of cultural gender roles experienced in your part of the world. But, a well trained, experienced therapist will have these considerations while exploring issues you present with. I would argue, that psychiatrists (which is a much more male dominated field) are much more of an issue, because their objective is not to help you come to conclusions about yourself. It is to medicate your symptoms away to allow you to function. I am sorry you did not have a good experience yourself, but that is not reflective of therapy, or counseling as a whole and your characterisation of men vs women in therapy is sexist and sounds more like male influencer talking points than lived experience.

  • I fail to see malicious sexism. Do you mind quoting them?

    i’d like to be very clear here… a lot of discussion about men’s spaces is thinly veiled sexism by incels… that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem, it just means that incels are attracted to “it’s not my fault”

    that said, there’s a comment up thread that captures it pretty well

    … mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion … always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.

    the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.

    … a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense … someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection

    it’s a meme (not in a “haha” joke way: in the actual meaning of the world; a thing that is repeated often) these days that there are horrible men who tell women (re sexism) “you must have misunderstood”… and the point of that is that men don’t have the life experience as a minority to be able to understand sexism, transphobia, etc (people treat them differently, and even if they see it they often can’t identify it because they’re not accustomed to listening for it 24/7)

    that same situation exists for men too… men are certainly not a minority, but nobody is allowed to say that someone’s experience is invalid… there’s a lot of people dismissing these experiences in this thread, and if it were reversed: a woman complaining about a man making a sexist comment, a gay man (of which i’m one) complaining about homophobia, there wouldn’t be any pushback at all because we’ve come to agree that this shit happens

    we know that toxic masculinity exists, we know that societal expectations of men are sky high (the suicide rate for men in particular is HUGE)… we’re clearly doing something wrong, as a society, dealing with male mental health… when people come out and tell us their experiences, it absolutely is sexist to write off those experiences as invalid: “i don’t think that kind of thing happens because i haven’t seen it”, is absolutely (anything)-ist language

    is it on the same level as problem as sexism or racism? probably not… but denying the problem helps nobody… denying the problem, in this case, makes the problem so much worse and pushes people to lash out and become sexist, racist, homophobic, etc (which is also not to remove blame from them - all those things are wrong and a personal choice and should have personal repercussions)

  • Yes they are. The genders are massivenly different in a lot of ways, and failure to acknowledge that is sexist.

    But keep screaming that anything that disagrees with your particular narrative that women are great and perpetual victims of men and men are always bad, I guess? Because that's not sexist, at all. lol

    it couldn't be that both men and women are people and both suffer from the same bullshit that they themselves perpetuate? nah.

    But keep screaming that anything that disagrees with your particular narrative that women are great and perpetual victims of men and men are always bad, I guess?

    Incel talk

  • Your comment is just very one sided and that’s the side that has the most power on the planet and as a member of that side I have just as much perspective of you and I’m here to say – nah to most of what you said.

    The only 'side' that has power is the wealthy. But keep banging your gender war drum, it probably gives you meaning and purpose in life to collectively blame 'me'n for all the worlds ills as if anyone who has a penis or wants a penis is entirely the same.

    Drink that kool aid. yum yum. Donald Trump and his buddies thank you for your vote.

    The only ‘side’ that has power is the wealthy.

    Pivot to wealth inequality because?

    But keep banging your gender war drum, it probably gives you meaning and purpose in life to collectively blame 'me’n for all the worlds ills as if anyone who has a penis or wants a penis is entirely the same.

    You are the one who made the issue about differences in sex and/or gender.

    No wonder you made no progress in therapy. You're completely obtuse.

  • Your comment is just very one sided and that’s the side that has the most power on the planet and as a member of that side I have just as much perspective of you and I’m here to say – nah to most of what you said.

    The only 'side' that has power is the wealthy. But keep banging your gender war drum, it probably gives you meaning and purpose in life to collectively blame 'me'n for all the worlds ills as if anyone who has a penis or wants a penis is entirely the same.

    Drink that kool aid. yum yum. Donald Trump and his buddies thank you for your vote.

    This is why you sucked in therapy and found it unhelpful. You're pissy, jaded and uncomfortable with the concept of being wrong. Classic men shit.

    Empathy would fix that, show that you don't have to be so insecure because nobody else is that secure.

  • i’d like to be very clear here… a lot of discussion about men’s spaces is thinly veiled sexism by incels… that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem, it just means that incels are attracted to “it’s not my fault”

    that said, there’s a comment up thread that captures it pretty well

    … mental health professionals all my 'issues' were blow way out of proportion … always 100% told me everything that happens to me is entirely my fault. they also told me it was normal/healthy to vent my feelings by doing productive things (like writing, exercising, relaxing), rather than viewing that as 'not addressing the problem'.

    the issue with so much of this crap is that not only does nobody want to talk to men, it's that they don't want to listen and/or the tell us we are 'talking wrong'. even when we do talk to people, there is only a tiny window of acceptable things we an talk about and way we can talk about them or how selfish it is of him to vent/indulge his legitimate emotions.

    … a man bursts into tears over his father dying of cancer and all the sudden everyone wants to tell him his reaction is too intense … someone in his life try to get him to 'open up' and then we he does he's met with nothing but hostility, disappointment, and eventually rejection

    it’s a meme (not in a “haha” joke way: in the actual meaning of the world; a thing that is repeated often) these days that there are horrible men who tell women (re sexism) “you must have misunderstood”… and the point of that is that men don’t have the life experience as a minority to be able to understand sexism, transphobia, etc (people treat them differently, and even if they see it they often can’t identify it because they’re not accustomed to listening for it 24/7)

    that same situation exists for men too… men are certainly not a minority, but nobody is allowed to say that someone’s experience is invalid… there’s a lot of people dismissing these experiences in this thread, and if it were reversed: a woman complaining about a man making a sexist comment, a gay man (of which i’m one) complaining about homophobia, there wouldn’t be any pushback at all because we’ve come to agree that this shit happens

    we know that toxic masculinity exists, we know that societal expectations of men are sky high (the suicide rate for men in particular is HUGE)… we’re clearly doing something wrong, as a society, dealing with male mental health… when people come out and tell us their experiences, it absolutely is sexist to write off those experiences as invalid: “i don’t think that kind of thing happens because i haven’t seen it”, is absolutely (anything)-ist language

    is it on the same level as problem as sexism or racism? probably not… but denying the problem helps nobody… denying the problem, in this case, makes the problem so much worse and pushes people to lash out and become sexist, racist, homophobic, etc (which is also not to remove blame from them - all those things are wrong and a personal choice and should have personal repercussions)

    I expected you to mean people exhibiting toxicity and not reporting about it. I was surprised because the comments seemed civil at large. Thank you.

  • What a clickbait. Of course people are picking feee resource with zero friction over 120$ an hour half a day event.

    in australia we have (limited) free mental health services (i wanna say 8 free sessions with a therapist?)… this still holds true

    it’s not only about money

  • Who said I am a dude?

    Dude is nongendered everyone is a dude, nice try tho trying to pull this though

  • in australia we have (limited) free mental health services (i wanna say 8 free sessions with a therapist?)… this still holds true

    it’s not only about money

    Another aussie here, Headspace is great too

  • I expected you to mean people exhibiting toxicity and not reporting about it. I was surprised because the comments seemed civil at large. Thank you.

    yeah id say it’s not overt, but that’s kinda the problem… it’s almost difficult to identify, so when it comes to mental health for men a lot of the time society, therapists, etc almost gaslights us into thinking our problems aren’t problems

    if it were overt it’d be easy to identify… the fact what it’s not, the fact that men are the majority, and are the problem in a lot of cases pushes people to certain conclusions (including ourselves about our own problems)

    mental health is complex af

  • Dude is nongendered everyone is a dude, nice try tho trying to pull this though

    I don't agree

  • Another aussie here, Headspace is great too

    yup! and absolutely worth the mention that if you’re queer (qlife), struggling with specific issues - alcohol, gambling, finance, eating disorders, etc - there’s specific support available to a lot of people in australia, the US, europe, etc

    if you need help, help is available! find one of these services who can help you find the specific support that you need, and go from there 🙂

    as a gay man, i found a lot more help when i started seeing services that specialised in queer health 🙂

    yall deserve someone who understands what you’re going through in life

  • A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.

    “Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.

    Of course men will go to an AI for their problems, they can't fathom going to a woman for honest advice.

    And as a result, they gaslight themselves with a worse version of ELIZA.