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The consequences of these dual trajectories, say specialists, is that the distinct emotional struggles of boys and men are largely being sidelined and that many psychotherapists are lacking expertise in dealing effectively with males' psychological difficulties.
A revealing study led by the University of B.C.'s Robinder Bedi found the vast majority of 293 research articles published over a 13-year period in the influential Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy centred on female-specific topics.
Research articles exclusively on female subjects out-numbered those on male subjects by four to one, Bedi discovered. When his team excluded a single special "men's" edition of the psychotherapy journal from their survey, the ratio of female- to male-oriented articles in the journal soared to 15 to one.
"All of this is occurring despite ... boys and men making up 34 per cent of individuals participating in counselling and psychology," writes Bedi, an assistant professor of counselling psychology at UBC.
"It appears that much of our knowledge about counselling Canadians has been based upon research samples composed predominantly of women and has been somewhat uncritically generalized to working with men," write Bedi and co-authors Courtney Young, Jaleh Davari, Karen Spring and Daniel Kane in a peer-reviewed paper titled A Content Analysis of Gendered Research.
Their overview of contemporary psychotherapeutic research in Canada dovetails with rising awareness across North America of a related development: That women are becoming even more predominant in counselling and psychology professions.
The American Psychological Association, which represents roughly 90,000 clinical psychologists, found women outnumber men by more than two to one. And it's quickly becoming more extreme: The ratio of female psychologists to male psychologists who are 35 and under jumps to nine to one.
"The gender gap in the psychology workforce has widened," says a report by the American Psychological Association. "This gender gap was even wider for racial/ethnic minority groups ... It is important to understand both why a greater number of females have entered the workforce and why fewer males have entered the workforce, and more males have exited."
The ever-widening chasm among younger psychologists is similar in Canada and B.C. The spring edition of The Chronicle, published by the B.C. College of Psychologists, included a chart showing the province has roughly six registered female psychologists age 35 and under for every one male psychologist of that same age group.
Reader Comments
"One would hardly believe that during the last half of the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth, a red-hot feminist controversy raged in Europe like the plague, and that virtually all the capable male minds of the time lent themselves to it, some maintaining that woman is by nature an inferior being, properly subject to man, and others maintaining the contrary. The subject had a large literature before the invention of printing; and after that, a great number of books appeared." The Superfluous Man p219 Albert Nock
"With the decline of the power of the Church and of the religious world view, in the seventeenth century, the inquisitor-witch complex disappeared and in its place there arose the alienist madman complex. In the new--secular and "scientific"--cultural climate, as in any other, there were still the disadvantaged, the disaffected, and the men who thought and criticized too much. Conformity was still demanded. The nonconformist, the objector, in short, all who denied or refused to affirm society's dominant values, were still the enemies of society. To be sure, the proper ordering of this new society was no longer conceptualized in terms of Divine Grace; instead, it was viewed in terms of Public Health. Its internal enemies were thus seen as mad; and Institutional Psychiatry came into being, as had the Inquisition earlier, to protect the group from this threat.
The origins of the mental hospital system bear out these generalizations. 'The great confinement of the insane,' as Michel Foucault aptly calls it, began in the seventeenth century: 'A date can serve as a landmark: 1656, the decree that founded, in Paris, the Hopital General.' The decree founding this establishment, and others throughout France, was issued by the king, Louis XIII: 'We choose to be guardian and protector of said Hopital General as being of royal founding . . . which is to be totally exempt from the direction, visitation, and jurisdiction of the officers of the General Reform . . . and from all others to whom we forbid all knowledge and jurisdiction in any fashion or manner whatsoever.'" The Manufacture of Madness p13 Thomas Szasz
Now women are taking over the enterprise and morphing it into a Feminist tool, while perpetuating the inherent mendacity. Its a perfect fit to the gender--talk "therapy"--a lot of hot air expended to convince the client to change their attitude to match the views of the practitioner/institution. From the beginning, there have always been more women than men as clients. Now they're colluding with each other, while also striving to convince their male clients to morph their behavior into alignment with female values. Many of them now believe it is empowering their gender. But as Hoffer pointed out, they're just changing one obsession for another.