Therapy for Men in Edinburgh

Opening

Most men come to therapy because they have already tried everything else. There is trouble, but the trouble began long ago, and they have spent months or years trying to manage it alone: working harder, drinking more than they’d intended, telling the one person they let in that they are fine whilst showing them that they are not. By the time they begin therapy, many know they are late through the door.

In England, men make up only about a third of referrals to NHS talking therapies (NHS England, 2025). This isn’t because men suffer less but because more men suffer alone. You don’t have to.

I am a psychodynamic and person-centred psychotherapist in Edinburgh. I work with men in person near the West End and online across the UK — professionals and fathers, men in midlife, and men who had never imagined sitting across from a therapist. This page is about what brings men to therapy, what keeps them away for so long, and what therapy can offer once they arrive.

What brings men to therapy

The reason a man gives for coming to therapy is rarely “I am struggling.” More often, it is the drinking. It is the temper that has started to frighten the people at home. It is the job that used to absorb everything and has stopped working as a hiding place. It is a marriage gone quiet, or a worry about the kind of father he is being. Underneath these is usually something simpler and harder to say: that you are tired, that you are lonely, that you have been carrying more than you can hold and have run out of places to set it down.

Some of this comes down to how men are raised. Many men learn early that they are meant to manage alone, that needing help is a kind of failure, and that their job is to hold others up rather than to be held up themselves (Addis & Mahalik, 2003). They become competent and capable, calm on the surface. They confide in no one, or in their romantic partner only, and they cope until coping is no longer possible.

None of this makes you unusual, and none of it makes you weak. Learning to live with others is one of the central challenges of life. In therapy you do not have to find this easy. You do not have to be strong. You do not have to cope. And you do not need to know the answers to your problems in order to raise them.

How distress shows up in men

Distress in men does not always look like sadness. Often it shows up in the body, and in behaviour. In the kinds of things a partner notices first. Your sleep suffers. You wake at four with your mind running. You drink a bit more, and a bit earlier, than you would like to admit. You hide this, from yourself as much as others. You grow short-tempered over trivial things. Your neck and shoulders stay tight, perhaps you grind your teeth, or have an ache in your back that defies physical cause. You may feel restless, wired, then suddenly flat. Your anger comes fast, then drops away, leaving you hollow.

You may long to be left alone then feel lonely in the same hour. You might know that something is wrong without having the words for it, without feeling “depressed” but without feeling whole. Much of the early work in therapy is about finding the words that fit your experience. There’s a profound relief that this can bring, for if you are unable to describe your experience you are destined to remain misunderstood. In expressing our suffering we find the promise that we are not alone.

What your anger is protecting

Anger (or frustration) is often the one feeling a man is allowed. By one pervasive myth of manhood, anger reads as strength, as force, as a sign of life. Sadness, by the same myth, is the opposite: weak, passive, a burden on those nearby. Because of this story, some men find that disallowed feelings, like sadness, arrive in their life as anger instead. Hurt comes out as anger. Fear comes out as anger. Shame, loneliness and need come out as anger, because anger allows you to stay in the role of the one who copes rather than the one who needs.

It goes back a long way: to fathers, or their absence; to the schoolyard, to soldiers. The pervading lesson is that part of what makes a man a man is that he provides and protects and does not buckle. To show need, in this model, is to be replaceable. To show need gives someone else a reason to rely on you less. Part of therapy is asking whether this story still rings true, whether it actually fits the nuance and complexity of your life, and whether belief in it is worth the price.

How I work with men

Therapy for men, in the way I practise it, is not a separate discipline with its own set of techniques. It is the same psychodynamic and person-centred work I offer everyone. What changes is not the method but the recognition: that men often arrive sideways into therapy (perhaps with real doubts about its appropriateness for them), that certain expressions of strength can become traps for men, and that the words for feeling sometimes have to be found before they can be used. I will not set out to treat your masculinity; we may not even discuss it. But I do want to understand what it has meant to you, at this point in your life and in these circumstances.

In practice this means two things. Firstly, as a person-centred therapist, I try to offer a relationship in which you can be honest without being judged, including about the parts of yourself you have kept out of sight. Secondly, as a psychodynamic therapist, I pay attention to the patterns beneath the surface: the old loyalties, the early relationships, the ways of coping that once protected you and may now be in your way. The pace is yours to set. I will not press you to be vulnerable before you are ready, but I will help you if you signal to me that you are.

A composite picture may illustrate what I mean, drawn from many cases and from no single client. This man is in his late forties. He has a good job in a large company. He earns more than he once thought possible, though never quite enough. He provides, and his family do not want for much, except perhaps for more of him. He seldom talks about his father. He never talks about his mother. He comes to therapy to talk about work, or about his marriage, or about his drinking. It is some time before he can face the emotions these crises have stirred in him. He is not used to feeling them, not in company. He has been told that he should not, and he does not want to be a burden. This is part of why he comes to me: he does not fear burdening me, because he pays me, and this is my job. It comforts him. It lets him keep me at a distance, which both allows and limits our work. We make progress, though he cannot yet let me see his need, or let me see him as someone who needs, and that holds us at a certain remove. The change, when it comes, arrives between sessions and reaches me as an aside. While I was away, he tells me, he missed our session. He had saved things to bring me, wondering what I would make of them. It was hard to wait. He says it, as if in apology, but I hear in his words the value he’s allowed himself to place on our time, and on our relationship. A man who has made a life of self-reliance has allowed himself to need.

This portrait is a composite, drawn from clinical experience. It describes no individual client.

What a course of therapy looks like

Most of my work is open-ended and weekly. Some men come with one knot to untangle and find a few months of work is enough. Others stay longer, because what brought them turns out to have deep roots, and because it helps to have one hour in the week that is wholly theirs and asks nothing of them in return.

People sometimes ask how this approach differs from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and which approach is better for them. The honest answer is that the choice is a personal one, and neither approach is inherently superior in the abstract. Cognitive behavioural therapy works closely with thought patterns and gives you tools to use day to day; for many people that is exactly what helps, and it is what the NHS most typically offers first. Psychodynamic therapy can ease the same symptoms (Shedler, 2010), but it tends to look further back, treating what troubles you now as an echo of something older and deeper, and staying with that cause until the change holds. It is this work that I am drawn to, and that I believe I do best.

If you need immediate help

The stark fact is that men die by suicide far more often than women. Across the UK, around three in four people who take their own lives are men, and male suicide rates are highest in midlife (Office for National Statistics, 2025). In Scotland the pattern is the same, with men accounting for nearly three-quarters of suicide deaths (National Records of Scotland, 2025). These figures are the reason men’s mental health is treated as a matter of public health. I include them here not to alarm you, but because the silence around this issue is part of what keeps men unwell.

If you are in immediate danger, or thinking of ending your life, working with me is not the place to start. Weekly therapy is not an emergency service, and between sessions I will not be available. Please reach out instead to someone who can answer now: the Samaritans on 116 123, free, day or night; NHS 111, choosing the mental health option; or 999 in an emergency. In Scotland you can also call Breathing Space on 0800 83 85 87. Your GP is a good first step too, for kinds of help I cannot give, including assessment, medication and referral. You can find these and other resources on the crisis support page. When you are on steadier ground, the deeper work can always come back.

Men’s mental health therapy in Edinburgh and online

I see clients in person at 22 Drumsheugh Gardens, a few minutes from Edinburgh’s West End, and online across the UK for men who would rather talk from home or cannot easily travel. Sessions last fifty minutes and are usually weekly. Fees and location are set out in full elsewhere; the headline is that I charge £70 per session and offer a free twenty-minute conversation, by phone or video, with no obligation to continue, so you can get some sense of me before deciding. If you would like to arrange one, you can reach me through the contact page, and I will reply within one working day.

Common questions

• Is therapy different for men?

  The method is the same. I offer the same psychodynamic and person-centred therapy to everyone I see. What can differ is the starting point. Men often arrive through a practical or external problem, take a little longer to trust the process, and need more room to find words for what they feel. So the work begins where you are, which for many men is some way from the language of emotion. The therapy itself is what I would offer anyone.

• I’m coping on my own. Is it serious enough for therapy?

  You do not have to be in crisis to come, and you do not have to justify the decision. Coping is not the same as being well, and many men spend years managing at a level of strain that is actively harming them. If some part of you is asking whether to come, this may be answer enough. Therapy is as much for the slow, low-grade kind of struggling as for the acute kind.

• Can therapy help with anger?

  Often, yes, though not by teaching you to clamp it down. Anger in men is frequently the visible edge of feelings that are harder to show: hurt, fear, sadness, shame. In therapy the question becomes what yours is protecting and where it learned to be your first response. As the feelings underneath become easier to feel and to name, the anger tends to loosen its grip, and you can gain more say over how you react.

• Should I see a male or female therapist?

  There is no one correct answer to this, and it is worth thinking about rather than leaving to chance. Some men find it easier to start with another man, expecting to be more readily understood. Others find that talking to a woman steps outside a lifetime of measuring themselves against other men, and lets them lower their guard sooner. There are many reasons to choose a therapist of either gender. What matters most to me is whether, after a session or two, you feel you can safely be honest with me. The free consultation is a good place to start working this out.

• I’ve never talked about my feelings before. How do I start?

  You start by turning up. You do not need the right words ready, and you do not need to arrive with insight prepared. Most men who have spent a lifetime not talking begin haltingly, in practical terms, and the language for feeling comes in time, with practice and without pressure. Part of my job is to help you find it. You’re not expected to be good at this yet, and the way to improve is to do it.

About this page

Written by Tom Wells, MBACP, COSCA. Last reviewed July 2026.

Trained at the University of Edinburgh (PGDip Counselling and Psychotherapy). Registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (profile on the BACP register) and with Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA).

Scope of practice: adults aged 18 and over; individual therapy only. I do not offer couples therapy, EMDR, formal diagnosis, or medication; where any of these would serve you better, I am glad to point you towards them.