Red Pill Psychology provides a new approach to men's mental health while rejecting the usual approaches of the mainstream therapeutic industry - its gendered assumptions, casual misandry, and default gynocentrism – all of which contributes to the aetiology of male suffering.
As you will read in the pages ahead, the therapeutic industry is also complicit in the dismissal of men’s pain, often burying it under working models that would deny very real pressures while shaming men who do not conform to society’s expectations of utilitarian male behaviour. One purpose of this volume is to redress those wrongs by placing the mental health spotlight squarely back on our culture, locating mental health or illness in the body politic and its gendered customs. This is not to say that social customs are the single cause of psychological suffering as many are indeed internal to the individual – they are his demons. But at the very least men’s issues are exacerbated if not outright caused by factors in the wider world, and it is on those influences we will focus our attention.
Part 1. The Usual Psychology for Men surveys the mental health industry’s culture of pathologizing men and boys while denying the legitimacy of their issues. Part 2. A New Psychology for Men outlines a new model for working with men based on their lived experiences. Part 3. Pathology provides examples of male suffering with a focus on social factors that so often contribute to it. Part 4. Relationships looks at the difficult area of ‘romantic’ and traditional relationship expectations for men, while proposing an alternative model of peer-style relationships based on friendship or companionship. Lastly Part 5. Archetypal Musings explores various archetypal themes to illuminate the nature and potential of the male psyche.
