Why High-Achieving Men Suffer in Silence |
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Men seek mental health care at significantly lower rates than women, even when equally distressed.
Emotional suppression is common in men, and it damages relationships and worsens psychological health.
High-achieving men are especially vulnerable to burnout.
Therapy can provide the outside perspective that high performers already use.
A lot of American men seem to be doing pretty well these days — at least, on the outside. Despite a jumble of obligations at work and at home, they’re still meeting deadlines, maintaining their social lives, and showing up for their partners or families. They might struggle through a few sleepless nights here and there, or have to work all weekend every once in a while, or take the red-eye that gets in just before an important meeting — but that's normal, right? And having a couple of beers before you go to bed, or not being able to concentrate because a big problem is hanging over your head — that’s just a natural consequence of taking on so many responsibilities, you might say to yourself. But therein lies the problem: That same ability to take on so much, and the belief that you should be able to handle it, is also what makes it hard to see the distress you feel. So what does it actually cost to keep it together, and how long can you keep that up before something breaks?
This dynamic may be true for all American adults, but it's especially true for men these days because they aren’t seeking out the care they need. According to Eggenberger et al. (2021), while 52 percent of American women had received mental health care over the preceding year, only 40 percent of men had. A 2026 study by Kleidermacher et al. found consistently higher psychotherapy use among women than men — especially among adults between the ages of 18 and 25, where the gap is as high as 22 percentage points. One might also wonder if the type of career a man holds might make him more, or less, likely to enter therapy, and research from 2023 in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health suggests that it does: Among the people surveyed, out of 11 emotionally distressed men with white-collar jobs, 10 hadn’t tried therapy........