Man Therapy: Training Health Practitioners for the Future
A new gender-specific approach for healing men’s mental, emotional, and relational problems.
When I began medical school in 1965 I had a vague notion that I wanted to become a healer and a subconscious desire to help men. It soon became clear that the medical education at U.C. San Francisco was more limited than I had hoped and I transferred to U.C. Berkeley where I eventually received a master’s degree in social work. During my three years in graduate school, I not only broadened by knowledge of the psychological, interpersonal, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of health, I also better understood my interest in men’s health.
I was five years old when my father took an overdose of sleeping pills because, as I would learn later, he had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t make a living doing what he loved to support his family. He was committed to the state mental hospital in Camarillo, north of our home in Los Angeles. It is the same hospital where the 1948 movie, The Snake Pit starring Olivia de Havilland, was filmed. I still remember the terror I felt going every Sunday with my uncle to visit my father in the mental hospital beginning in 1949. I watched as his depression worsened and his mental…
