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

The flip side of that is vast numbers of Gen Z Men saying many Gen Z women are basically misandrists, who asked them to stop interacting with them unprompted, no more unwanted attention... so they did that, they stopped... and now all they see is IG and TikToks of Gen Z Women complaining that no one asks them out on dates anymore, no one is 6' tall with a 6 figure income becore the age of 30, and willing to worship them as a queen.

I am not saying this is any kind of objectively accurate to whatever degree, but I am saying that this is the very common, general vibe.

So, in that situation: Why bother?

Many men can actually be fulfilled just staying actually single, as in not even dating single, snd getting their own lives, finances, health, to a better place.

Yes this does though also mean that ... because we've just got less general, face to face socialization going on that... basically a larger than otherwise number of them will basically develop harmful, reinforcing neuroses, in harmful echo chambers... but at the same time, that applies to women as well.

This is what happens when you jam a broad economic collapse up alongside a highly digital and publicized modern media landscape that is tweaked all to fuck to highlight and push the most extreme version of everything... along with extremely mixed messaging that an only digitally socialized person recieves, but all as a firehose, that is very hard to make true sense of.

So... fuck this shit I'm out... social withdrawal... basically becomes a reasonable mental health improving move, even if it does leave you kinda socially stunted as compared to pre-internet generations.

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'.

🤷‍♂️

won’t ruin your career

Granted, but it still will suck a fuck ton of coal produced electricity.

Got it. No therapist it is.

that's easy to say, but when someone is in a crisis, I would be wrong to judge then for talking to an AI (shitty terrible solution) instead of a therapist that can be unaffordable and also comes with a risk of then being terrible.

Do they need therapy? Or do they need a world they can actually fucking live in?

It's not like either one is available to them.

This response is why men feel scared and uncomfortable opening up. You are a part of the problem. For your male family members' sake, I hope you check in on them instead of just being sexist online.

I dealt with the same thing in all my relationships. Nothing got my gfs hotter than when I acted like a complete asshole towards other people. They got off the duality of me being shit to people and the being this 'sweet man' to them. And they'd get super jealous and bitter if I was kind towards anyone else other than them. It was Toxic AF. It made me hate myself and made me depressed. To know that i had to be a shithead to get my girlfriends to like me.

I'm so much happier single. I'd rather not get laid then have to be a POS asshole like they wanted me to be. Soooo many people get off on anti-social behaviors. I'm also so glad I never got married or had children with these ladies who have such a horrible Zero Sum way of thinking about the world.

They wanted me to be vulnerable, but only in the sense that I was some heroic figure overcoming the odds. If i said I was sad when my dog died or my dad died, then I was a giant pussy to them.

When shitty people only validate your shitty emotions... well that's why so many women only date shitty men. Because they are turned off sexually by men who are more complex or behave outside of their per-determiend 'what a man should be' image. Especially when you reject them for sex... holy shit. Way to see what a lady really thinks of a men when a man turns her down for sex.

In my many years single now, I do a lot of volunteer work. Giving back here and there w/ kids and adults and community building. I've never met or a dated lady who thought it was cool. They all think it's weird to be kind to strangers and/or I'm secretly homosexual if I do so. If it comes up they always get 'suspicious'.

My mental image the solution of your last paragraph is a guy and their counsoler just chatting outside chopping firewood or other simple/quiet lawn work.

"I need a therapist, and a lumberjack"

Therapy is just littered with bad therapists, that do more harm than good and give the practice a bad name.

For every 1 good therapist, there are probably 10+ bad ones.

It can be a fucking ordeal to navigate, financially and emotionally, to try and find the one good one.

My worst experience was a therapist which charged me 300 dollars a session to do nothing but talk about how amazing they were, and that I need to just suck it up and be amazing like they are, afterall, it was so easy for them.

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 an even moreso 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.

This is pretty sexist.

Coping skills are not gender specific. How they help is different for each individual.

Women have their emotions unsupported just as much as men I know my mom didn't have anyone caring about how she felt. Pretty sure that's the stereotype of most American moms, they work all day come home cook and clean too.

I've never seen a man cry and be told to stop by anyone other than their own father. I've seen countless women be mocked for being emotional.

Sorry bro your comment is far too one sided to be taken seriously by me. Society is hard on everyone.

Haha, not every place is in the US. Hopefully, I won't face this kind of treatment as I do not live in that shit hole of a country

Sorta agree. Men only spaces make me, a dude, uncomfortable because y'all are weird about women

Probably the closest space any guy could get is AA or NA meetings.

what do these abbreviations stand for?

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)

In my experience, it's likely that some of those downvotes come from reflexive "AI bad! How dare you say AI good!" Reactions, not anything specific to mental health. For a community called "technology" there's a pretty strong anti-AI bubble going on here.

Another aussie here, Headspace is great too

TBH this is a huge factor.

I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I'm socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.

It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I'm talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.

It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment depending on someone else, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.

But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.

Tbh, yeah. I'm a woman with an inoperable brain tumor, and I can completely understand why people would be reluctant to accept "nothing to be done" as a real answer.

If I thought I deserved to live, I'd probably talk to a LLM about it because this topic drags everybody down, and my therapist only sees me once a week. Though, I've heard its good for helping people not live, so maybe its worth a shot after all.

The real problem becomes when bad or non scientific advice gets regurgitated to people over and over.

"Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!"

I get it, but I'm not sure that "something is better than nothing" in this case. I don't judge any individual for using it, but the risks are huge, as others have documented. And the benefits are questionable.

everyone’s a friend which drinks beer at the same table 🍻

Ok, so the solution to men feeling too scared to open up about their mental health enough to rely on something as unreliable as ChatGPT is for you to victim blame them?