Men Are Finally Going to Therapy. What Changed and What Took So Long?

The statistics moved faster than many expected. In 2019, men in England were still roughly half as likely as women to seek help for a mental health problem, according to NHS Digital data. By 2023 and into 2024, that gap had narrowed considerably, particularly among men aged between twenty-five and forty-five. NHS Talking Therapies reported that male referrals as a proportion of total referrals increased from around thirty-six per cent in 2019 to over forty per cent by 2023, a meaningful shift in a short time frame. Waiting lists at many counselling services are running longer than before, and a significant portion of the new demand is male.

Something shifted. The question worth asking is what?

The men who go to therapy now tend to say the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

Part of the answer is generational. Men born in the late 1980s and 1990s grew up with a substantially different relationship to the language of mental health than their fathers did. They came of age at a time when the conversation was beginning to change, when public figures, athletes, and male celebrities began

discussing depression, anxiety, and therapy with a frankness that would have been considered professionally damaging a generation earlier. The footballer Thierry Henry speaking publicly about therapy, or Princes William and Harry launching Heads Together in 2016, gave cultural permission for a conversation that had previously felt foreclosed. When the permission was granted, people took it.

Part of the answer is the pandemic. Lockdown produced a sustained period of enforced stillness in which the coping mechanisms that typically kept difficult feelings at a manageable distance, work, socialising, sport, physical movement, the general forward momentum of busy life, were simultaneously unavailable. Research published in the Lancet Psychiatry in 2021 found that while some mental health outcomes were more resilient than anticipated, the prolonged disruption of social connection and routine produced lasting effects, particularly among those with pre-existing vulnerability. A significant number of men found themselves, for the first time in their adult lives, unable to outrun what they were feeling. Some of them decided to do something about it.

The format of therapy has changed too, in ways that matter particularly for men. Online therapy, which expanded dramatically from 2020 onwards through platforms including BACP-accredited services and NHS Talking Therapies digital provision, removed several barriers that had historically kept men out of the consulting room. No waiting room with its implicit exposure. No journey that requires explaining to a colleague or manager. No physical presence in a space associated in many men's minds with weakness or crisis. You sit in your car, your home office, or wherever you have privacy, and you talk to a qualified professional for fifty minutes. Nobody needs to know.

Messaging has shifted as well. Organisations including CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably), Movember, and the Mental Health Foundation have moved away from crisis-focused language, which research suggested was alienating to men who did not see themselves as being in crisis, towards frameworks around mental fitness, maintenance, and performance. The idea that looking after your mental health is what competent, capable people do, rather than what struggling people are forced into, has gained traction. It reaches men in ways that deficit-based messaging historically did not.

The men who go to therapy now tend to say the same thing when asked about it: they wish they had done it sooner. Not because it is easy or comfortable, most accounts describe it as effortful and sometimes confronting, but because the alternative, managing alone, turns out to require more energy than they had accounted for. The effort of not asking for help is its own kind of invisible labour.

Members have access to mental health and counselling services through our wellbeing partners. If you have been thinking about starting therapy, or returning to it, log in to your benefits hub and visit the wellbeing section to see what is available as part of your membership

MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT THROUGH YOUR MEMBERSHIP
Members have access to counselling and wellbeing services through our mental health partner providers Harley Therapy Platform.
Log in to your benefits hub to explore support options.