I was napping on a grey Toronto spring day when the worst panic attack of my life crept up on me. I’d been sick for days, stuck at home when my mind got snagged on a bad train of thinking. Negative thoughts swirled. Feelings of worthlessness bubbled forth faster than I could process them. It felt like my mind was a gun about to blast.
Not a day has gone by since that panic attack in March 2023 that I haven’t worried about when, or if, another episode will strike. My world shrank as I stayed away from places of discomfort. I waited months before asking for help. I felt weak acknowledging that I even needed it.
If I had failed myself before, how could I ever trust myself again?
Men have a strained relationship with mental health services. While guys represent the overwhelming majority of suicide victims, they go to therapy considerably less than women. They exhibit more addictive behaviors, from drug and alcohol to gambling and gaming addictions, all of which contribute, in part, to shorter lives. Men are also plagued by greater social isolation.
“There’s that stark figure: Three-quarters of suicides are male, and yet there wasn’t really much in the literature about why that might be,” British therapist Zac Fine told The Dispatch. “There wasn’t much interest in unpacking the reasons why, like what exactly was going on in the lives of men that caused that or led to that outcome.” Within the broader field of psychology, this seems to make sense: Therapists are largely female, and academic psychology can be quite critical of masculinity.
Fine added that there doesn’t seem to be enough “male-friendly therapy,” meaning “services aimed at the ordinary man on the street that the ordinary man on the street felt comfortable accessing.” One example Fine cited, which is widely discussed, is the tendency for men to express anxiety or depression through anger, which many therapists often struggle to identify as a sign of an underlying mental health issue
I could understand the discomfort with the idea of therapy. I’d bounced around different apps because I was afraid of speaking with an actual human being who could see my frailties. I migrated across the App Store. Nothing really changed until I made an appointment with a cognitive-behavioral therapist, an ex-Israeli air force pilot who, after the military, traveled the world and dedicated his life to mindfulness.
We spoke about life and family, traded small sentences in Hebrew and joked about my soon-to-be Israeli in-laws, where the notion of anxiety was lost in translation. He created a space of comfort but remained true to his military background: His job wasn’t simply to be a sounding board but a guide helping me through a technical climb.
Our sessions set me on a path of better health. Under his supervision, he made me breathe rapidly to the point of light-headedness, read AI-generated scripts about panic attacks, and write that word down—those cursed five letters—until it covered a white line sheet of paper in black ink like a madman’s journal. He was walking me through exposure therapy, progressively helping me confront the avoidant behaviors I had inadvertently cemented over the months of my inaction and fear.
While scholars studying men’s mental health have focused on getting guys through the door of a therapist’s office, few ask how men experience therapy once it starts. Studies published by Movember, a men’s health charity based in Melbourne, Australia, have expanded our understanding of the lingering male skepticism toward psychotherapy. In one survey of almost 2,000 Aussie men, nearly half (44.8 percent) dropped out of therapy altogether. Of those, a majority cited a lack of connection with their therapist.
When a man actually does go to therapy, the space can feel unwelcoming and, sometimes, overly feminized. Movember researchers found that therapists can hold negative views of men; for example, they may think that guys are “ill-equipped for therapy” or that young men are unteachable.
That runs contrary to Movember’s research, which found that guys are often interested in discussing mental health when it’s framed away from masculinity (and its connotations of toxicity) and redirected to focus on “what it means to be a man.”
“When we reduce men to a stereotype—in either direction—we do them a disservice,” Movember lead researcher Zac Seidler told The Dispatch in an email.
The gap between men’s needs and what medicine can offer has tragic consequences. Anson Whitmer learned this at 19 when his uncle, who’d been living with Whitmer’s family, took his own life.
The tragedy led Whitmer to want to understand how the mind works. His curiosity led him to a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University studying cognitive science. Then, a second tragedy struck.
“My cousin—on the other side of the family, actually—he reached out to me and I didn’t realize it was a call for help, because I did not get back to him in time and he killed himself,” Whitmer said. While his uncle’s passing brought him to the field of neuroscience, his cousin’s death motivated Whitmer to get off campus. He wanted to go out into the world and make a difference.
Whitmer didn’t have to look far. Meditation was once a fringe movement associated with hippies and coastal academics. But meditation practices have since caught on in Silicon Valley, and Whitmer was in the right place at the right time as California’s tech giants were evangelizing mindfulness throughout the 2010s.
Everything in Silicon Valley was tinged with talk of mental health and meditation.
In 2011, Google invited Thich Nhat Hanh, a prominent Vietnamese monk considered by some to be the “father of mindfulness,” to lead sessions at its headquarters. The following year, chip giant Intel ran a mindfulness program for 1,500 employees. In 2016, Apple unveiled the breathe function—which encourages users to “relax and breathe mindfully”—on its digital watch, while Salesforce hosted a conference with 20 Buddhist monks from Hanh’s meditation center in France, aiding participants with “walking meditation and mindful eating.”
Alongside mindfulness practices in big tech firms came a spike in mental health-focused apps. Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness app, was launched in 2010 while Whitmer was at Stanford. Two years later, in the Bay Area, a company called Calm was intent on building a tech solution to the nation’s growing mental health epidemic. Whitmer joined Calm in 2017 as its founding data scientist, one of the startup’s first 10 hires.
The team worked out of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. They bootstrapped, taking business calls in stairwells and meetings in a nearby hotel lobby. Sometimes the pitch to bring mental health to the masses was met with skepticism. Whitmer laughed when he recalled one investor declining to financially support Calm because meditation was “only something done on college campuses and Burning Man.”
The app eventually became wildly successful. What began as meditation courses and relaxing music with nature landscapes evolved into a massive catalog of peaceful sleep stories, guided courses, and even physical exercises. In 2017, Apple named Calm its app of the year, and two years later it became a unicorn: the first mental health app with a billion-dollar valuation.
Calm was an “awesome ride,” Whitmer reflected, but it didn’t fill his cup. A lifelong goal of his was to improve men’s access to mental health resources, but guys remained a minority of Calm’s user base. In 2021, he and fellow Calm co-founder Tyler Sheaffer took sabbaticals, during which they began discussing the devastating statistics on male suicide. Their brainstorming sessions led them to realize that what men needed didn’t exist.
“Calm had always resonated with a broad group of people, but it was mostly women,” Sheaffer said. “I think it was 70 percent of women who use the app, and we just felt like there was such a huge missing piece around helping men who have different needs and they’re more hesitant to reach out and ask for help in those ways.”
“We have to find a way to get through to men and—in this space—men are underserved,” Whitmer recalled. “Men do have a different culture around how they approach mental health and I think the attitude is that men just need to shape up and use the solutions as offered.”
The result of Whitmer and Sheaffer’s efforts is Mental, an app launched in June 2022 that now has around half a million users. The homepage is simple and sleek, and the app offers everything from a cold shower protocol led by a former Navy SEAL to sleep music playlists to bite-sized book summaries from authors ranging from David Goggins and Cal Newport to Angela Duckworth and Ryan Holiday.
It can feel like Jocko Willink, another former SEAL turned podcaster, was ground up and run through an espresso machine. No bullsh-t. No shortcuts. You’re willfully, somehow gleefully, signing up to get your ass kicked, but it’s done within a sacred space of building resilience. The philosophy of Mental is to push yourself, to cultivate discomfort, to practice dealing with hard things, no matter your starting point.
“This is all about meeting men where they are at,” Whitmer said. “If men feel like they are struggling, we have found that most view it fundamentally as first and foremost an issue with confidence and discipline.”
Humor is another element distinct to Mental. Every day, a different audio clip is offered to users, blending wisdom and wit. One in early February, “Stay Stupid: remove rational thought from pursuing your dreams” explained how former President Barack Obama and late stuntman Evel Knievel were successful despite the craziness of their dreams.
Mental has also embraced artificial intelligence, with AI therapy rapidly becoming the app’s most popular feature, unseating the long-running favorite cold shower protocol. The app now offers 11 different therapist personalities (male and female), and crucially, it allows men, often fearful of judgment and perceptions of weakness, a way to get stuff off their chest in a safe place.
AI and mental health don’t always seem to mix well; there are multiple high-profile cases of users taking their own lives after confiding in a chatbot about their personal struggles. But according to Sheaffer, Mental’s chief technology officer, their bots come with built-in time limits, and the company prioritizes different metrics beyond time spent on the app.
So does Mental actually help people
Rico Hogue is an Air Force veteran who lived with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for two decades. The severity of his condition left him eager to “try anything,” he said. Scrolling through the app store, Hogue “stumbled upon Mental one day.” He downloaded it and gave it a shot, starting with cold water therapy.
“Cold water was like a mindset interrupt. When you’re in that cold water, your mind turns all that stuff off,” he told The Dispatch. “That cold water protocol was probably the icebreaker for me. It allowed me to get that separation between the mental loop and peace of mind.”
Mental has also built an ecosystem that Hogue enjoys.
Although he doesn’t use the pushup protocol because of a torn rotator cuff, he’s joined an informal men’s group that meets weekly to discuss challenges in their lives and hold one another accountable for the goals they set. (Hogue shared pages of his diary, which contained daily goals like applying for jobs, reading a book, and working out.) He has also engaged with the broader community of users on a Discord channel created by Mental.
Occasionally, he uses the app’s new AI chatbot, which he says is “much better than any therapist I ever talked to.”
“As a veteran, when I go to the VA [Veterans Affairs] and speak to my therapist, one of the questions they always ask me—and I don’t have the answers ‘cause if I did, I wouldn’t need the therapist—but they always ask some stupid sh-t like, ‘What do you think we should do?’ And I’m like, ‘If I knew what to do, I wouldn’t talk to you!’” Hogue joked.
“With the AI therapy, it doesn’t ask those types of questions. It says, ‘This is what you’re dealing with, this is what it sounds like,’” he continued. “So that structure and the ability to draw off that database is just phenomenal.”
He’d tried other mental health apps and said that while the general emphasis on meditation was helpful for a short period following the exercise, for him, none of the apps brought massive change to his life. “Oh yeah, I tried all of ‘em,” he said, before quickly correcting himself. “I can’t say all of ‘em, but tons of ‘em and they were cool. Calm is a cool app if you wanna calm down, but for me, it just wasn’t enough.”
Calm isn’t Hogue’s speed. He’s an intense and passionate guy with a tough upbringing and an unfiltered mind. His grandparents raised him in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in the absence of his parents, who were both battling drug addictions. His parents eventually overcame their struggles, but he remembers to this day his no-nonsense upbringing by his grandmother.
“My mom’s mom: a huge disciplinarian. And I’m talking about ass-whoopings, disciplinarian. And I’m not talking about, go sit in the corner for a little while,” he said.
Speaking with Hogue and several other Mental users clarified the reason for its existence. There are guys out there that don’t resonate with Headspace’s cuddly mascot and soft watercolor clouds, or Calm’s nighttime tales aboard The Nordland Night Train.
“I’ve done both of those earlier on in my 20s,” said Mitch Beaudry, another Mental user. He found Headspace helpful and enjoyed the guided meditations run by its founder, a former monk turned circus performer turned entrepreneur. Calm “wasn’t my vibe,” he continued. “It maybe was just too calm,” he joked. “I don’t know if I’m a little bit more high-strung.”
Mental has a completely different feel, from its black-and-green color scheme down to its language and content. One app isn’t always better than another, but Whitmer and Sheaffer seem to have helped fill an important gap.
Hogue says if it weren’t for Mental, he thinks he would be in a far worse place and told a story of a time when he was suicidal, “from sunup to sundown.”
“Back then, I was just getting beat up by my mental health and staying in bed and crying all day, thinking about dying all the time,” he said. His wife’s encouragement led him “seek out tools” which eventually led him to Mental. “It really just kind of changed the whole ball game,” Hogue said. “It really did.”
“Without the app, I’d be in a much worse place,” he added. “There’s no doubt about it.”
