Andrew Tate isn't really my problem in a psychiatry appointment.
Sections
Andrew Tate isn’t really my problem in a psychiatry appointment. The nineteen-year-old whose only model for being a man is Andrew Tate is the problem in the appointment. Same with the Huberman-stack guy who’s six supplements deep and convinced his cortisol is the reason he’s miserable. Same with the Joe Rogan listener who’s pretty sure SSRIs (the Lexapro/Zoloft family of antidepressants) are a conspiracy. These guys aren’t actually the same guy, but they’re close enough that the playbook for each one rhymes… and the playbook for talking to him is not what most of his family is doing, which is yelling at him.
The actual concern, said carefully
The manosphere, broadly defined, fills a real vacuum. Young men in 2026 don’t have a lot of cultural scripts for what to do with their interior lives. The traditional scripts (church, military, union job, family) have weakened or disappeared for most of them, especially in the cities. The replacement scripts offered by mainstream culture mostly tell them they’re the problem, which lands roughly the same way as being told you smell bad by somebody you weren’t asking. Into that vacuum walks a guy with a podcast and a Bugatti who says, actually, you’re fine, the world is the problem, here’s a workout plan and a supplement stack and a worldview. For a lot of these guys, it’s the first time in years anyone has spoken to them like they matter.
That part isn’t crazy. That part is fairly easy to understand if you’re being honest about it, and most of the people writing think pieces about this aren’t being honest about it. The part that gets clinically dangerous is when the worldview becomes a closed system. When the explanation for every problem is external (women, the government, your testosterone, the seed oils, the carbs, your roommate), there’s nothing left to work on internally, because there’s nothing internal that’s the problem. That’s where the depression hides, because depression on the manosphere read becomes a symptom of low T or bad food or feminism, never something the patient himself can do something about. Which is convenient, in the short term, because nothing has to change. It’s also the part that keeps people stuck for years.
Where Huberman fits, since he’s the respectable face of this universe
Andrew Huberman is the most legitimate-looking node in the broader network, a Stanford neuroscientist with a real research background, and most of what he says about sleep, sunlight, exercise, and circadian rhythm is fine and well-supported by data. The trouble is two layers down from the basics. First, the supplement stack he sells around the basics is where the evidence gets fuzzy, because the data on a lot of those supplements is thin and motivated by who’s selling them. Second, and more importantly, the protocol-only worldview tends to drift into a place where if your protocol is dialed and you’re still miserable, the answer is just more protocol, more measurement, more supplements, more cold plunges. The possibility that the issue might not be a sunlight deficiency or a cortisol problem just doesn’t come up.
If your protocol is dialed and you’re still depressed, that’s information. That’s the data point that says depression isn’t a sunlight deficiency, it’s a depression, and what depression actually responds to (medication, behavior change, dealing honestly with the situation underneath) has been sitting there the whole time. A lot of the patients who land in a psychiatry appointment after years of trying to optimize their way out of something show up only when the protocol starts to crack, which is sometimes the only thing that gets them in the door at all. The cracking is the opening.
The clinical flags worth watching
The pattern that tells me a guy is in the bad part of this space and not the harmless part is rarely one thing. It’s the combination. Here are the ones that show up most:
- The worldview is closed. Disagreement is dismissed as cope, blue-pilled, or NPC behavior. There’s no version of the conversation where he might be wrong about anything important. If you find yourself trying to argue and getting nowhere, you’re not failing at arguing, you’re running into the closure itself.
- The locus of control is fully external. Every single problem in his life is somebody else’s fault, usually a category of people (women, liberals, his boss, his ex, his coworkers, his parents, the previous generation). Nothing in his life is something he might be doing.
- He’s measuring things that aren’t useful. Daily testosterone-spit tests, cortisol curves throughout the day, Oura ring HRV (heart rate variability) obsessions, body fat percentage measured to one decimal point. The measurement becomes the activity. The data accumulates without ever changing anything.
- He’s stopped having friends who push back. The social circle has narrowed to people who agree, online communities that reinforce, and content that confirms. Anyone in his life who used to disagree with him about anything has either left or stopped saying anything.
- The supplements have crept up. He’s six or seven bottles deep and the answer to feeling bad is always to add a seventh, never to subtract one. Always more, never less.
None of these alone is a diagnosis of anything. The pattern of several at once, especially the closed worldview plus the fully external locus of control, is where the clinical work needs to start.
How you actually talk to him about it
The frontal assault on the worldview triggers exactly the closed-system defense that’s the problem in the first place, which is why families who try to argue him out of it usually make things worse. You don’t argue Tate. You don’t argue Huberman. You don’t try to dismantle the framework, because the framework is doing real work for him, and asking him to give it up before there’s something to replace it with feels (correctly, to him) like asking him to drop his life preserver in open water.
What works, slowly, is the side door. Find the one specific thing inside his framework that isn’t actually working and stay with it. He’s slept eight hours and cold-plunged and is on three nootropics and he still feels like nothing matters. That’s the crack. That’s where you point and say, okay, what would you do with that information if the protocol isn’t the answer. Not “the protocol is wrong.” Not “this whole worldview is dumb.” Just, here’s a real fact inside your own framework that the framework doesn’t have a good explanation for, what do you make of that.
The conversation is slower than the manosphere built the worldview, because the manosphere had algorithmic distribution and you’ve got an hour every other week if you’re lucky. Patience matters here more than rhetoric. Trying to be clever is mostly counterproductive, because clever in this register sounds like another person trying to manipulate him, and a guy whose worldview is built around the idea that everyone is trying to manipulate him will read your cleverness as exactly that.
The pattern, in shape rather than person
The kind of guy who lands in an appointment is usually somebody in his early twenties, living somewhere he doesn’t want to be, working part-time at something that doesn’t matter to him, deep in the red-pill or Huberman-protocol space, who’s come in only because his mom or his sister made the appointment and he agreed to one visit to get her off his back. He shows up in workout clothes, very polite, very guarded. He’s on a stack of supplements that runs into the dozens of dollars per week, lifting heavy four days a week, sleeping in a blackout room with mouth tape and a chest strap to monitor his sleep.
His testosterone is normal. His sleep architecture, as far as the wearable can tell, is good. His body fat is single digits. He’s also depressed in a way that makes it hard for him to leave the house for anything that isn’t the gym, hasn’t had a friend in the real-life sense for years, and cannot remember the last time he laughed at something he didn’t expect.
You don’t argue the worldview. You ask him what the protocol is supposed to deliver. He says, feeling good, getting strong, being optimized. You ask him if he feels good. He says, no, but he probably isn’t doing it right yet, or the next supplement is going to be the one that lands it, or his cortisol curve is still a little off. You let that hang in the air for a minute, without trying to fix it. Eventually, if the conversation is going well, he says the quiet part out loud, which is that he’s scared the protocol isn’t the answer because if it isn’t the answer he doesn’t have one. That’s the moment. That’s where the rest of the work becomes possible.
From there, the actual treatment is whatever’s actually wrong. Wellbutrin (bupropion, an antidepressant that doesn’t tank libido or cause weight gain, which is important for keeping a manosphere-adjacent guy on it) at a starting dose, working up to a real dose over a few weeks. The gym stays. The supplements that are doing something stay. The ones that aren’t doing anything get dropped quietly over a few months without making it a fight. Eight months in, the depression is moving, he’s got a job he doesn’t hate, two friends he met outside the internet, and a girl at work he genuinely seems to like. The worldview softens by itself. Most of the manosphere content just gets boring once his actual life gets interesting, which is something nobody in the discourse mentions but is most of how this works in practice.
What’s nice to hear about all this
The manosphere doesn’t actually win in the long run for most of these guys, even the ones currently the deepest in it. Life is the thing that fixes the worldview, not the argument. Once he has a job he doesn’t hate, two real-life friends, a girl who likes him, and a couple of months of feeling less terrible, the closed worldview opens up on its own without anyone needing to dismantle it. The content gets boring. The supplements get expensive. The lifting stays, because the lifting is actually good for him, but the lifting was never really the problem.
The version of him that walks out of the appointment a year later is not somebody who’s been re-educated out of his beliefs, it’s somebody whose life got interesting enough that he stopped needing a worldview to give it meaning. That’s a slower fix and an uglier process than the discourse would like, and it’s mostly the only thing that actually works.
The manosphere fills a real vacuum. The clinical problem is when the worldview becomes a closed system and every internal problem becomes an external explanation.
Bottom line
The version of all this that’s just a guy lifting weights and listening to long podcasts isn’t a problem. The version where the worldview has eaten everything else, including the parts of his life that used to bring him pleasure, is where the clinical work lives. If your kid, your brother, your friend is in the second version, the way out is one crack in the framework, patiently held open, until enough real life can grow back in to make the worldview unnecessary. You aren’t arguing him out of it. You’re outlasting it.
Sources
- Ging D. Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities. 2019;22(4):638-657.
- Bratich JZ, Banet-Weiser S. From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism. Int J Commun. 2019;13:5003-5027.
- Twenge JM, Joiner TE, Rogers ML, Martin GN. Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents. Clin Psychol Sci. 2018;6(1):3-17.
