What Will Happen When All the Male Therapists Are Gone?

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What Will Happen When All the Male Therapists Are Gone?

Psychology is increasingly a female-dominated profession. That may have implications for boys and men.

By Pamela Paul, WSJ

March 12, 2026

When Martin Seligman, bestselling author, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most influential figures in the field, became a psychologist in the mid-1960s, the ratio of men to women in the field was 80 to 20. Today, that ratio has flipped.

“The main consequence of the feminization of psychology is the topics that are worked on,” says Seligman. “From the 1960s through the 1980s, it was aggression, conflict and trauma, but not love, meaning, friendship or cooperation.” Then, in the ‘90s, the prevailing areas of research flipped, becoming less violent and more humane.

Fittingly for the founder of the field of positive psychology, Seligman sees this as a good thing. “But one downside,” he says, “is there’s not as much research now on therapy and issues for boys and men.”

For decades, the field of Freud and Jung tended to prioritize males and pathologize females. (Think hysterical women and refrigerator mothers). But the landscape of mental health, from research psychology to psychiatry, has since skewed, in some cases overwhelmingly, female. In the U.S., men now account for only 18% of social workers and 20% of psychologists, down from 38% and 68% in 1968 respectively, according to the American Institute of Boys and Men (AIBM), a research and advocacy organization founded in 2023.

“The lack of male representation in the mental health professions couldn’t come at a worse time,” says Richard Reeves, founder of AIBM and author of “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It.” American boys are falling behind in school and tumbling into perilous internet rabbit holes. Suicide rates among men ages 25 to 34 are on the rise. Men are trailing women in the workplace. Popular discourse is dominated by phrases like “toxic masculinity,” “the male loneliness epidemic” and “male malaise.”

Both male and female therapists stress the importance of providing positive, pro-social and professional alternatives to the often noxious influence of the manosphere. But while there’s plenty of talk about the problem with men, there is far less conversation around how to help them.

That second problem is poised to get even worse. While a field increasingly dominated by women has become more open to studying issues like pregnancy, motherhood and female sexuality, it may also exert its own biases. Nonetheless, when it comes to a deliberate exploration of men’s inner lives—how they think, feel and express themselves—the male psyche is becoming less the norm than an aberration.

“One of the big problems with the helping professions now is that they approach men and boys with a deficit perspective,” says Mark Kiselica, a former president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities at the American Psychological Association. “They are greatly influenced by models that look at how boys and men are flawed rather than about how boys and men are different.”

Guy Talk

Though men have historically been therapy-avoidant, in recent years, more are interested in getting professional help. In 2024, 17.3% of men sought some form of counseling up from 8.7% in 2002.

Mental health professionals are adamant that a skilled clinician can work with both sexes and that a therapist’s gender rarely determines outcome. A large body of research shows that “therapeutic alliance”—a combination of shared method, communication preferences and approach—is the strongest indicator for success.

That said, some men prefer to open up to other men. According to one of the few studies on the subject, 40% of men have a gender preference in therapists, evenly divided between men and women. The most common reasons they gave for preferring men were feeling more comfortable (46%) and feeling better understood (26%). They also felt more empathy from and less judged by male therapists.

In interviews, clinicians noted that men who work in male-dominated fields—combat veterans, police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers—are especially likely to want a therapist either with similar experiences or who “speaks the same language.” Some men prefer to talk to someone they think will viscerally understand what they’re grappling with, whether it’s bullying, sexual issues, intrusive thoughts, masculinity, fatherhood, divorce or job loss.

“The stuff that’s embarrassing, the pornography they’re looking at, whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual, they don’t want to tell a female therapist,” says Adam Schachar, a social worker in private practice. “They don’t want to tell a male therapist either, but they’re more willing to share.”

This may be especially true for young people. “There’s a common-sensical understanding that it may be easier for teenage boys to talk to male clinicians and girls with female clinicians,” says Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.”

Yet starting in school, most kids’ first encounter with the helping professions, the face of mental health is increasingly female; in 2025, only 10% of school counselors were men. As of 2021, only 10% of master’s degree recipients who specialized in developmental and child psychology were male.

An influx of women into mental health has had the unintended consequence of declining pay and prestige, which only compounds men’s tendency to steer clear of the field. But longtime practitioners point to other factors behind the trend. “A lot of guys aren’t drawn to grad school in psychology because they sense they’re not wanted there,” says psychologist Daniel Ellenberg, a past president of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychology of Men and Masculinities. “If you have women grad students who tell guys to ‘just shut up, you’ve talked long enough,’ a 24-year-old guy will be like, “What? I’m responsible for that?”

Ellenberg, who has run men’s therapy groups in the Bay Area for decades, blames binary thinking in our culture, which tends to see certain roles as strongly gender coded. Men who want to work with kids, for example, are looked on with suspicion, he says. “Guys still learn that being in the healing arts is somehow very feminine. As much as I would love to see this craziness die of what’s considered masculine and what’s considered feminine, it just doesn’t go away.”

Benji Hadar, who recently got his masters in social work and works as a psychotherapist at a community behavioral health clinic in New York, was surprised not only by the paucity of fellow male students but also by the extent to which men were overlooked in his coursework.

Dr. Orna Guralnik in a therapy session, gesturing as she speaks to a couple, in front of a bookshelf.

Orna Guralnik on the show ‘Couples Therapy.’ Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

“I was very unimpressed with how unseriously men’s mental health was taken in classes,” Hadar says. “Men’s concerns and needs were generally ignored relative to those of other demographic groups. We are just making it harder for anyone to approach men’s mental health in a serious way.”

What’s Men’s Problem?

Men’s and boys’ mental health needs often differ from those of females in key ways. According to both researchers and clinicians, broadly speaking, women tend more toward internalizing behaviors like anxiety and depression while men tend to externalize their problems into addiction, aggression, risk-taking and anger. They often avoid emotional disclosure and regard vulnerability as a sign of weakness, which can make them challenging as patients.

“A male clinician can reduce the fear of being judged or exposed or misunderstood and lower the threshold for exposure,” says Michael Zakalik, a clinical psychologist based in Seattle. “It normalizes the experience without necessarily feminizing it.” Simply seeing an emotionally fluent adult man can, he says, can itself be a therapeutic intervention.

In his own practice, Zakalik tries to reframe therapy in ways that men can more easily relate to. “A patient might describe a difficult experience and then say, ‘But I was tough.’ And I say, ‘What do you mean by tough? I think it’s pretty tough coming in here and crying in front of me. That’s tough.”

Offering group therapy—which builds on men’s tendency to communicate “shoulder to shoulder” rather than face to face—is another effective way to get men to open up. Ronald Levant, author of “The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist,” has found men’s groups especially useful in engaging men who foot-drag their way to therapy.

“The men come in and are surprised to see so many other men because they have long believed that they’re the only ones with this problem and that other guys are fine,” he says. “They think, ‘I’m the only schmuck that feels this bad,’ and never get the corrective feedback that depression is like the common cold of mental illness.”

Roughly 15 percent of U.S. men aged 21 to 25 years reported experiencing a major depressive episode in 2024. It’s estimated that roughly 1 in 5 men suffer from some form of mental illness—a share that has increased from 13.6% in 2008.

More research into these trends could help clinicians better understand how to address them, says Zac Seidler, global director of Men’s Health Research at Movember in Sydney. But rather than devote resources to researching the underlying issues, “we continue to try to diagnose a problem without actually speaking to the men.”

“People in the field often refer to me as a ‘specialist’ because I focus on men and I’m like, ‘No this is 50% of the population,’” says Seidler. “That says everything about where we’re at.” Seidler, who conducted the study on men’s gender preferences in therapists, is often viewed with suspicion—by the left as a Trojan horse for the men’s rights movement and by the right as a radical feminist who is somehow emasculating men by wanting to explore their emotional lives.

“I’m only 10 years out of my Ph.D. and it only took me a few years to become one of the top 10 experts in the world on the subject,” Seidler says. “I walked into a very wide-open space.”