Recommendations for male-friendly individual counseling with men: A qualitative systematic literature review for the period 1995–2016.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there have been calls to customize therapy for men. Researchers have increasingly become aware of the impact of masculinity on men and their psychological health, their willingness to seek help, and their experience of therapy. Recommendations have been published for how to enhance engagement and therapeutic change for men in counseling. This article systematically collected and examined recommendations for individual male-friendly therapy from 44 sources written over a 21-year period to identify common themes using qualitative methodology. The resulting 4 themes included knowledge about men, masculinity, and socialization; therapist critical self-awareness and commitment; masculinity-informed treatment adaptations; and masculinity-informed tasks and goals. The themes were discussed in relation to relevant research and similar diversity-sensitive approaches, including different ways that masculinity knowledge was incorporated into treatment and the ethical implications of targeting traditional masculinity for change. Increased empirical research on malefriendly counseling is needed to validate existing recommendations.

Men’s Dropout From Mental Health Services: Results From a Survey of Australian Men Across the Life Span

“…To understand participants’ experiences of their therapists’ efforts to engage them in therapy, participants were asked to rate whether or not they felt various therapist strategies occurred during their engagement and orientation into therapy. The 13 strategies (i.e., therapist microskills) were derived from past summaries of effective engagement tactics for working with male clients and were included with a view to achieving an overall index of the extent to which participants were engaged in therapy (Beel et al, 2018; Seidler, Rice, Ogrodniczuk, et al, 2018). The items, presented in full in the supplementary material, covered various areas including effective orientation to therapy (e.g., The therapist asked about my expectations of therapy ), adopting a strengths-based masculinities perspective (e.g., The therapist talked about me seeking help in positive terms ), and shared control and decision-making (e.g., The therapist checked whether I felt like therapy was working for me ).…”

“…Placing the perspective of therapists above that of the client in defining dropout obscures clients’ agency in their own determination of therapy duration and outcome. This consideration seems especially pertinent in therapy with men, given shared control and decision-making are emerging as essential strategies for male engagement (Beel et al, 2018; Seidler, Rice, Ogrodniczuk, et al, 2018). Existing research examining dropout often disregards the personalized account and autonomy of the client and their reasons for leaving therapy prematurely.…”

Challenges working with men: Australian therapists' perspectives

“…By contrast, examining therapists' perspectives as an avenue to advancing treatment engagement and outcomes for men, has gained scant attention in the research literature. In the few published studies, male and female therapists tended to report some discomfort when working with male clients relative to female clients and often described men as being unmotivated in therapy, aggressive, abusive, emotionally restrictive, and/or deficient (Beel et al, 2018; Johansson & Olsson, 2013; Mahalik et al, 2012; Vogel et al, 2003). Mental health professionals have also been shown to invoke traditional masculinity socialization in explaining several challenging aspects thought to be emblematic of many men's presentation to therapy, such as late initiations to treatment at the point of crisis alongside expectations for rapid improvement (Stiawa et al, 2020).…”

Counseling Men: Treatment Recommendations From Australian Men’s Therapists

“…A second can be found in the scholarly literature, including books, book chapters, and journal articles. These are commonly written by authors who are both researchers and practitioners (Brooks, 2010;Englar-Carlson, 2014;Pollack & Levant, 1998), with most produced from a North American context (Beel, Jeffries, Brownlow, Winterbotham, & du Preez, 2018). Another source of recommendations and practice wisdom is from therapists (Brewer & Tidy, 2017).…”