The feminized profession

A NY Times article says:

Researchers began tracking the “feminization” of mental health care more than a generation ago, when women started to outnumber men in fields like psychology and counseling. Today the takeover is almost complete.

Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists.

Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.

The result, many therapists argue, is that the profession is at risk of losing its appeal for a large group of sufferers — most of them men — who would like to receive therapy but prefer to start with a male therapist.

Of the few male therapists, they are nearly all effeminate and/or Jewish and/or con men.

I might rather have a male therapist, if it were a man with whom I had something in common. They do not exist.

I have never met a manly therapist. If I am going to be talking to an effeminate man, I as might as well be talking to a woman.

“Many men like this believe that only another man can help them, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not,” Dr. Levant said. “What’s important is what the client believes.”

This is the pitch of a con man. It does not matter to Levant whether the client is helped; he only wants the client to believe that he is being helped, so that he will pay the bill.