Technology

Well those sound like people who aren't good to open up to.

I do sympathize though, I pretended to be a guy for several decades, and my wife put exactly the same kind of duality on me that men put on women.

I was expected to be sympathetic and nurturing in some contexts and aggressive, jealous, and demanding in others, and I was just supposed to know when to switch.

And there was an amount of vulnerability I was able to display, but beyond that I'd get told to suck it up.

I think somebody needs to come up with an ad campaign that's Therapy For Men. Big sweaty hairy guys with thick beards looking after each other's mental health like BROs. It worked to get men to use soap.

(Seriously, I think counseling is too female-coded for a lot of men to be comfortable with it unless they're fucking the person, or they start to want to fuck the person because they're unused to talking about things).

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.

I don't think the open internet is a great place to open up about your mental health either. Trusted family, friends, and medical/mental health professionals are the best resources. Entrusting something as precious as your mental health to AI or the internet is a profoundly bad idea.

If you gave all your personal details and vulnerabilities to a corporation's chatbot then you fucking should feel attacked rn. You know these AI have been in the news for telling people to commit suicide for a while now, right? Either get real professional help or go browse some public discord/matrix channels about your interests to find somebody to voice chat to, fr.

Also worth noting that:

1. AI is arguably a surveillance technology that's built on decades of our patterns

2. The US government is increasingly authoritarian and has expressed interest in throwing neurodivergent people into labor camps

3. Large AI companies like OpenAI are signing contracts with the Department of defense

If I were a US citizen, I would be avoiding discussing my personal life with AI like the plague.

It’s is effectively self-treatment with more steps.

And for many people it's better than nothing and likely the best they can do. Waiting lists for a basic therapist in my area are months long. Shorter if you pay out of pocket, but that isn't affordable to average people because it's like 300-400 for a one hour session.

You should blame them because the AI is not a solution to their problems, it will only create more problems and worsen their current ones.

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.