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Males are disappearing from the field of North American psychology — both as research subjects and as psychotherapists.

The evidence is overwhelming that psychological research is becoming heavily focused on girls’ and women’s issues, and that males are rapidly vanishing from psycho-therapeutic professions.

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The consequences of these dual trajectories, say specialists, is that the distinct emotional struggles of boys and men are largely being sidelined and that many psychotherapists are lacking expertise in dealing effectively with males’ psychological difficulties.

A revealing study led by the University of B.C.’s Robinder Bedi found the vast majority of 293 research articles published over a 13-year period in the influential Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy centred on female-specific topics.

Research articles exclusively on female subjects out-numbered those on male subjects by four to one, Bedi discovered. When his team excluded a single special “men’s” edition of the psychotherapy journal from their survey, the ratio of female- to male-oriented articles in the journal soared to 15 to one.