I am often shocked at the stigma that is still attached to mental health conditions and treatment for those conditions.

I have friends and friendly acquaintances who have bragged in recent years about never having seen a psychologist or about only having seen one for a brief period.

I have friends and friendly acquaintances who have bragged in recent years about never having taken an antidepressant or about having had the courage, fortitude and discernment to stop taking one soon after they were advised to start taking one.

Imagine someone bragging to you about never having seen a dentist or about having refused antibiotics for a urinary tract infection.

You wouldn’t be impressed. You’d think the person was a little peculiar and not in a good way. You’d think, “Not only does this person need a dentist and Amoxicillin; he needs a talk therapist and psychiatric medication. He also needs to stand at least five feet away from me when he talks. I wonder if I have a mint in my purse.”

Mental and emotional health is a realm of personal wellness where people still think they can get mileage out of bragging about the care they didn’t seek.

As the kids say: “That’s not the flex you think it is.”

I am not saying everyone needs talk therapy or psychiatric medications, but I do believe that a lot more people need them than are availing themselves of them.

I think this is especially true of men.

When I was a boy growing up in the Buffalo area in the 1970s, my father taught me that talk therapists were nothing but charlatans, con artists and tricksters. Like patent medicine salesmen, they had nothing to sell, but they sold it persuasively.

My father was a commanding and competent person. He was a veterinarian by trade who was also an adept carpenter and landscaper. There was little he couldn’t master or so it seemed to me at the time.

He projected fearlessness during every waking hour.

He did not like effusive displays of emotion (from his sons, especially), but he didn’t seem to mind anger. He wasn’t at all reticent where displaying anger was concerned.

I remember the shame I felt in grad school going to my first appointment with a therapist.

I would have been less embarrassed entering a bordello.

No one could have predicted that decades after he railed against the psychological professions, my dad would check himself into the psychiatric ward of a hospital in the wake of a nervous breakdown.

I am not here to humiliate my late father, and I am not here to blame him for anything that has gone wrong in my life.

It is absolutely true that he did the best he could, just as I am doing the best that I can.

He was the first to admit that the niceties of parenting were not his forte.

But I have come to understand over the years that anger always starts as fear.

Which means that my father was far from fearless. If he was angry almost every day of his life, it follows that he must have been afraid almost every day of his life.

Of what? I have my theories. My dad may have had some inkling as well.

But one thing he definitely was afraid of was examining what he was afraid of. He did not want to look inward. He had a searching intellect, but he did not want to apply it to what made him tick.

There is a contemporary psychological principle you may have encountered: Hurt people hurt people.

I have seen the truth of it play out again and again in families I have known.

A parent or parental figure is afraid to examine their brokenness, so they perpetuate it.

Unintentionally, to be sure.

They are “doing the best they can,” while pretending they don’t need treatment for their psychological wounds or while insisting they don’t have any.

It’s time to throw our “pull yourself up by your bootstraps/suck it up, buttercup/boys don’t cry/take it like a man” mentality in the trash bin where it belongs.

If you are hurting the people who love you because you are terrified of the emotional skeletons in your psychological closet, you aren’t doing the best you can.

A real tough guy faces up to his shortcomings and heals what needs to be healed.