this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Men will talk to a chatbot instead of going to therapy
I go to a therapist and she treats me like a five year old.
I can literally just read her basic CBT training online, its not hard to find.
Then I do the excercises at home.
CBT being basically the only kind of approach to therapy that is actually empirically shown to reliably actually help most people.
Oh, you're seeking an therapist qualified and specialized for high functioning autists?
There aren't any in the state anymore.
...
I also think that using ChatGPT as a therapist is a fucking horrible idea, but uh, therapy in America is expensive, and often shit quality, oh and they just hand out pills that you'll become dependent on, willy nilly, as opposed to trying everything else first and using that as a last resort.
Learning that as an acronym for cock and ball torture before the therapy version makes me laugh every time.
My experience with women therapists was always about how I just wasn't paying enough attention to other people when I pointed out that the people around me weren't consistent enough to figure out their patterns. My one therapist who was a man explained that most people are just better at handling it when they were wrong and it is fine to be wrong, plus he helped me get diagnosed with ADHD instead of telling me to just try harder. I'll bet there are some therapists who are women who are just as good as he was, but it became pretty clear that social norms are just as hard for people who specialize in behaviors to overcome.
what makes you think their gender is even relevant to their practice?
Gender and sex broadly influence socialization and communication norms in many ways.
Yep, there are many cases where people do not conform to standard gender/sex norms... but the norms do still broadly, empirically exist or have a physiological basis.
Personally, I am all for breaking down gender norms and stereotypes and roles, and everyone being accepting of more variance and deviation from the norm, as many people do not neatly adhere to the patriarchal hetero dichotomy norm.
... But many still do.
Especially where I am right now, in a poor red state (had to move quite far to find somewhere I could afford to rent), where the education quality is laughable, and traditional gender/sex norms are very prevalent, there are no legal protections against discrimination against queer, disabled persons such as myself.
EDIT:
Also, another, perhaps more direct way to answer your question:
I don't know how you're reading this, but again, I meant what I said.
What makes me think that gender and sex affect a person's efficacy in the psych field, as it pertains to treating different sex/genders, is that I have personally experienced this.
I have been seeing many different kinds of pscyh professionals for a very long time... kickstarted by my mother having a mental break down when I was a kid, and then my family developing a very dysfunctional dynamic, then us all going to family therapy, and then basically each of us continuing on with individual therapy, and moving, and then moving again, and then again...
So I have seen many, many different psych people in my life thus far, and from my own, personal experience... it is far more common for women to interperet things I am saying as hostile and aggressive.
Switch over to a male therapist, if this is possible given insurance and local staffing constraints... and oh hey wow, nearly none of them interpret me as hostile, and I'm acting the same way.
...
I really don't see how this is that baffling of a concept... it is very common with PCPs, for example, sometimes various nurses as well... for your gender/sex preference as to who will be caring for you to be something that is asked.
It is fairly common for say, queer folks to be able to request or prefer a queer therapist... many addiction counselors are former addicts themselves, and this often is very important to establishing trust and relatibility with an addict seeking to detox or go clean.
There's a whole wealth of academic literature about how male PCPs will often downplay women's legitimate health concerns, and I find such literature to be largely valid.
In comparison, there is nearly no literature on how women mental health experts downplay (or even aggravate) men's mental health concerns, despite this being part of the broad stereotype of 'why don't men go to therapy?'
Yep, a lot of it is from the machismo and social stigma.
Another lot of it is from... a lot of guys who actually get over those things and try it, well they basically feel unheard, that their treatment was ineffective or unhelpful at addressing their concerns, or even worse, they feel basically gaslit and manipulated.
...
In conclusion, perhaps the most useful medicsl advice I have ever recieved, and I will joyfully tell you it was from a woman:
Be your own advocate, especially if you don't have a reliable support network in your general life.
They are human beings who are more frequently able to relate to people who are similar to them based on shared experiences including social pressures. I don't think either gender is unable to relate to the other gender, but social pressure is pretty strong and leads to common outcomes that involve pressures based race, gender, and economic status among others. Someone from a wealthy family is more likely to have a certain outlook compared to someone who had food insecurity as a child.