Researchers began tracking the “feminization” of mental health care more than a generation ago, when women started to outnumber men in fields like psychology and counseling. Today the takeover is almost complete.

Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists.

May 22, 2011 Benedict Carey reports Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find – NYTimes.com.

The reasons for the shift are economic as well as cultural, most people in these professions agree. Managed care took a bite out of therapists’ incomes in the 1990s. Psychiatry, the most male-dominated corner of therapy, increasingly turned to drug treatments. And as women entered the work force in greater numbers, they proved to be more drawn to the talking cure than men — in giving the treatment as well as in receiving it.

The impact of this gender switch on the value of therapy is negligible, studies suggest. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one.

Studies that I’ve posted on here emphasize that there has to be a good fit, or chemistry, between the therapist and patient. I, personally, have found good that fit with both one woman and two men, but their three styles were different, and that difference helpful.

“Many men like this believe that only another man can help them, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not,” Dr. Levant said. “What’s important is what the client believes.”

Anecdotally, Carey reports, male therapists and male patients both say that topics like sex, affairs, aggression, fatherhood are best discussed within gender.

Ryan McKelley, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. “Now I tell my male students, if you’re interested in clinical care, you can write your own ticket. You’ll be hired immediately.”