Men and Mental Health: Why Healing Spaces Need to Include Every Gender
The wellness industry has a blind spot. And it is costing lives.
If you have spent any time in therapy circles, wellness communities, or healing spaces, online or in person, you may have noticed a pattern. Many of the spaces being created are directed towards women. And there are real, valid reasons for this. Women need safe containers. Therapists run businesses, and niching makes sense. The work being done in women-centred spaces is genuinely important and much needed.
But a question keeps surfacing, one that I think the therapeutic community needs to sit with more honestly:
Where are the men?
The Reality of Men's Mental Health
The numbers are hard to sit with. Men make up 50% of the population but nearly 80% of suicides. Nearly 1 in 10 men experience depression or anxiety, yet fewer than half ever receive treatment. Perhaps most telling of all: fewer than 1 in 5 men had contact with a mental health professional in the year leading up to their death by suicide.
These are not men who don't need help. These are men who never found, or never felt entitled to, a space where help was genuinely available to them.
The silence is not accidental. As the writer and cultural critic Bell Hooks argued, patriarchy does not only oppress women, it also destroys men. Men pay an enormous price for dominance: disconnection from themselves, from intimacy, from their children, from any authentic sense of who they are beneath the performance. Culture, hooks insisted, offers men in pain only two responses: rage or numbness. Neither is healing. Neither is sustainable.
What Actually Happens When Men Come to Art Therapy
This is where my experience as an art psychotherapist tells a different story from the cultural script.
In my private practice, working with clients online and across multiple locations, I have had the privilege of sitting with some extraordinary men. What I have witnessed challenges every assumption about male emotional unavailability.
Men open up. Not always through words. Not always immediately. But through making, through image, material, colour, and form, they find ways to express what has never felt safe enough to say out loud. Art psychotherapy creates a different kind of entry point. It sidesteps the internal editor. It bypasses the part of us that has spent decades performing composure. It offers permission that talking alone sometimes cannot.
The men I work with are showing up. They are tending to themselves. And in doing so, they become more present — for themselves, and for everyone around them.
Art Therapy for Men: A Space Built for You Too
If you are a man who has considered therapy but found the available spaces didn't quite feel like they were made with you in mind, that feeling is worth taking seriously. It reflects something real about how the wellness world has been built.
And if you are someone who loves a man who is struggling (a partner, a parent, a friend) know that there are spaces where something different is possible. Where the door is genuinely open.
I work with men and people of all genders in individual art psychotherapy sessions, held online. If you are curious about what this kind of work might look like for you, I offer a free initial consultation so we can explore it together, with no pressure and no expectation.