Almost like questioning an AI is free while a therapist costs a LOT of money.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Yeah, but also one of them is helpful and the other is the exact opposite. If the choices are AI therapist or no therapist, you are still better off with no therapist.
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.
Got it. No therapist it is.
That's what I'm doing. That and screaming into a pillow most nights.
I don’t scream into a pillow. I just wake up at dawn and have a panic attack until I have to actually move.
There are other causes here.
They've been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they're tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.
It's a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they're withdrawing.
I'm guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.
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.
amen. best thing i ever did for my mental, physical and financial health was to stop dating.
most women I ever dated were nothing but a total drain on my well-being, and did almost nothing to contribute to it positively. the only women who were ever really a net positive to me were female friends who encouraged me in my interests and passions and who shared those same ones with me.
Sadly I've never been able to date anyone who saw my passions as a positive... just a negative becuase often their soul interest in the world was getting money, attention, and generating drama out of our relationship so they could 'feel feelings'. So many ladies see relationships as nothing more than drug dispensing feel good machines (the same women who think all men want is sex... ironically). People need to realize that relationships are way more than that.
I remember so many times trying to have serious talk with my girlfriends and they just... got uncomfortable or just tried to sex me up to shut me up. They dind't want to deal with anything serious or adult. And these were adult women in their 30s. The only adult things they wanted to talk about was vacation plans or restaurants.
But it sucks, as happy as I am alone I want something more. I want a family and kids and to contribute to society in that way, but frankly, I don't really meet any women who want that. They just seem to want to be consumers first and foremost and productive members of society who care about more than themsevles... is not really on their wishlist.
I have been volunteering a lot, but it's really not the same. It's nice, but like working out, it doesn't feel like it's really going anywhere other than just staving off the inevitable decline as best I can. All my volunteer work just is a tiny drop of givnig a shit in the massive bucket of neglect that is our society as we amuse ourselves to death via social media and consumer trends.
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.
I'm glad you're not because this is patently false. As soon as you get out of the internet you find young people dating is alive and well.
I mean, to a certain degree this is broadly true.
Like we have the numbers, younger generations are waaaay less likely to have had a relationship or sexual encounter by the same age/stage in their life as compared to previous generations, way more people just are relationship inexperienced.
This goes for both genders/sexes, though it is more prominent with younger men than women.
The overwhelming problem is that in the US, so much in person socialization is expensive, basically pay-gated, paywalled.
There are very few third places you can just hang out at for no cost. Public transit sucks or is non existant, cars are super unaffordable due to collapsing economy, and all our cities are designed for using cars to drive from place to place... so very few places are actually walk-navigable...
Everyone is increasingly overweight and overworked (or over homeworked, for students) and overstressed, so they can't or don't engage in group meet up hobbies or sports as much as they used to... and ironically even religiosity levels overall trending down means less people are going to church... all the traditional methods of getting socialization and expanding out a friend network in real life are withering.
So, the easier path is to get your socialization, of all kinds, primarily digitally.
But all those most common and popular ways of doing that are also massively manipulative with algos intentionally feeding you whatever ragebait slop appeals to you, personally.
It is very ironic that, as basically a 90s kid myself, very early tech adopter... my view of the vast majority of social media now is that it is basically a mentally harmful and addictive drug that people need to detox from... but when I tell younger people that, they say things like 'its not that deep bro, everybody has a (whatever) profile'.
There are lots of studies that show that very common levels of social media app usage... do actually reduce attention spans, spread dangerous misinformation, lower academic performance, cause negative self esteem by way of unrealistic standards, of beauty, lifestyle, wealth... brainrot is real, basically.
Like, I am all for the TikTok ban for kids. But also ban all short form video content for kids. Instagram, Youtube shorts, whatever.
This shit is melting peoples brains, it needs to be treated the same way you'd treat a drug epidemic.
We are now at the point where kids give so little of a fuck, have such tiny attention spans and need for constant, rapid fire stimulation... that half of adult Americans read below a 6th grade level, 20-30% of them read below a 2nd grade level, making them functionally illiterate... and thats just with Gen Z now mostly being in those young adult numbers, its gonna be even worse when Gen Alpha graduates and starts trying to enter society/the workforce.
EDIT:
This isn't even broadly unprecedented.
Look at Japan.
Hikkikomori.
The stagnant economy becomes overly financialized and corporatized and impossibly demanding... so people just drop out of it, or worse, kill themselves from the stress of trying to live up to its expectations...
And well then yeah, in person socializing broadly drops, relationship dynamics become strained and morph, birth rate plummets.
Give it 5 or 10 years and we'll have something resembling rent a boyfriend/girlfriend services and maid / stud cafes as well, as the stereotypified fascimile of socialization and having a real relstionship becomes a marketable product, and then industry.
Maybe a few areas will even properly legalize and regulate prostitution.
Granted, that'll be in any areas that remain even kind of blue.
The red areas will just go full theocrat and send you to jail for masturbating, but also re-legalize child marriage, and rework marriage laws into 'covenant marriage', where basically the woman functionally cannot divorce the husband.
In summary: cyberpunk hypercapitalism is in fact very very bad for healthy human relationship dynamics.
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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.
man is conditioned from a young age not to show feelings
I feel like you skipped over this part way too quickly. Myself and other men have been hearing things like "it's not manly to cry", "whining isn't going to do anything for you", "being weak is girly", and countless other things for my entire memorable life
And it's not just men telling me this. It's men, women, adults, my classmates, teachers and mentors.
It's not a good thing. And it's changing now, which is so good. But man hearing that from your earliest memories makes it really set in.
Thank you for expanding on that point. I meant it to be a "here's how we got here" before the rest of my "this is where we are today."
You're totally right, and any conversation about men's behavior at large should include the experiences you just described. Even though we didn't get ourselves into this situation - in that we didn't raise ourselves - we're the ones who will get us out.
I see a lot of people in this thread reacting with open hostility and derailment every time men's issues are mentioned. Have you tried not being a part of the problem?
Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.
After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.
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.
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.
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.
Like... yeah?
Tried to open to a girlfriend about a sensitive topic - she got the ick.
Tried to make an appointment with a psychiatrist - got a very hateful rejection because of my place of birth.
Damn, even when I try to uplift a friend, I use phrases like 'you got this before, you'll get it now'.
I don't know how to be a man, mentally
The amount of sexism in this comment section is...unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn't I'll make one.
Edit: No idea what I'm doing but !Reprieve@lemmy.zip
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)
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
incels are people. their problems are legitimate problems.
why society can't acknowledge this is beyond me. I guess because it's socially unpalatable.
incels or any extremist thing (terfs, religions extremists, etc) ... is a product of the same issues. but people just want those people to 'go away' and not address the issues that would actaully make them go away... because that is hard.
The amount of sexism in this comment section is…unnerving. Does a community exist for male identifying people to talk and share their troubles in a non hostile space? If it doesn’t I’ll make one.
No. Because if it it did it would be shut down as being hostile and offensive to women and a space for proto-rapists to hang out.
Probably the closest space any guy could get is AA or NA meetings.
Too bad for them I made one
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So somewhere they feel safe to do so. Says something pretty fucked up about our culture that men don't feel safe to open up anywhere. And no, it's not their own fault.
Alternate title "Men so starved of sources of support they resort to talking to AI"
Edit: have started a new com for men to talk to each other instead of AI !Reprieve@lemmy.zip
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I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn't gonna judge you, an AI isn't gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It's giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.
AI might also be giving them better advice than anyone else in their life.
Growing up I certainly had no role models in my entire community. I never found anyone who was remotely helpful until I went to an expensive college that had lots of resources and they were freely accessible to me. Mental, physical, and academic.
A lot of people fail to realize these resources simple do not exist in large swaths of the country/economic bracket. They are mostly concentrated in wealthy and educated areas and given to wealth educated people who live there. If a farmer in Nebraska needs therapy, they will have to drive to multiple hours to Omaha or another urban area to have a decent shot at getting any assistance. Not everyone lives in a major coastal city that have the bulk of these resources.
Better than nothing I guess. Obviously it's a privacy nightmare. But therapy is hard to reach nowadays and I've noticed that many men are reluctant to make that step. It'd be preferable if they did, but if ChatGPT can at least give an outlet for the emotions then it might just save a few people. Seeing men demolish themselves because they're too ashamed to seek help is something I've unfortunately seen quite often. Even though I'm aware of this I've still waited till it was way too late because I subconsciously didn't want to give in to the "weakness". I hate that men are conditioned this way, it costs lives.
many men are reluctant to make that step
Sometimes it's not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood... I sought help... Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn't work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got "nothing" (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second "struggled to find any complaints from me". So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and "care" in general, human or whatnot). I don't use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I'm deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn't get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have "Geschwind Syndrome", a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).
Part of me is ok with this in that any avenue to get mental health resources can be better than nothing. What worries me is that people will use ChatGPT for this sort of thing and these models will not be good help.
I'll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn't want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I'm an AI hater. I wouldn't recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.
It's stupid as hell to share any personal information with a company that is interested in spying on you and feeding your data to the nearest advertiser they can find.
Like seriously -- are people using their brains or what?
are people using their brains or what?
What? No. Seriously, are you new here? And by here I mean Earth.
I see idiots all around me. Everybody only interested in advancing themselves. But if we advanced the group, it would be better for EVERYBODY.
But we as a species are too stupid to build a society that benefits everybody.
So no. No brain use here.
Donald Trump was ELECTED TWICE. How is the stupidity of humanity not apparent.
they need therapy, obviously they need help, and blaming them for not doing the most reasonable thing that might be unaffordable is even stupider.
blame predatory AI, openai could in a single afternoon make it so Chatgpt recomends or even helps you find a local therapist, instead of enabling this for profit.
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