Brian Pollack, LCSW, CEDS-C
Brian is the Founder and Clinical Director of Hilltop Behavioral Health, a boutique eating disorder specialty practice in Summit, NJ. He is one of the few male master’s-level Certified Eating Disorder Specialists in the country, with expertise in FBT, male clients, athletes, and muscle dysmorphia. He hosts the Minding Men podcast and serves as an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University.
Learn more about Brian →You’re not searching “am I weak” because you think you are. You’re searching it because somewhere underneath everything, the real voice says something quieter and harder:
I’m not good enough. I keep failing. Something is wrong with me.
That voice has probably been there for a while. And you’ve probably been doing everything you can to outrun it – working harder, pushing your body further, staying busy enough that it can’t catch up.
I’m Brian Pollack, LCSW, CEDS-C – one of the few male certified eating disorder specialists in the country, and the founder of Hilltop Behavioral Health in Summit, NJ. I work with men every day who are carrying exactly what you’re describing. What I’ve learned is this: the men who ask “am I weak?” are almost never the ones who actually are. They’re the ones who feel everything and have nowhere to put it.
That’s not weakness. That’s an absence of the right support.
What people usually mean by “signs of a weak man,” and why I’d push back on the list
Search that phrase and you’ll find checklists: emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, defensive, resistant to change. In my years treating men at Hilltop, here’s what I’ve noticed about those lists: they describe pain, not character. A man who’s emotionally unavailable is usually protecting himself from something. A man who’s inconsistent is often overwhelmed in ways he hasn’t named yet. A man who’s defensive is frequently the most afraid of what he’d find if he stopped defending.
None of that makes the behavior fine. It just means the checklist is diagnosing the wrong thing. The definition of a weak man that gets passed around online was never written by anyone who treats men clinically. You don’t fix “weakness.” You address what’s actually driving the behavior, and that’s a very different, much more answerable question.
What “I’m Weak” Usually Actually Means
When a man says he feels weak, he’s rarely talking about strength. He’s talking about one or more of these things:
Something feels broken and he can’t identify it. The pressure to appear in control, successful, and unaffected is enormous – and when that pressure can’t be maintained, the only available word is “failure” or “weak.” Neither is accurate.
He’s been managing something alone for too long. Food, his body, anxiety, the way he pushes himself physically – these things don’t usually announce themselves as problems. They creep in. By the time a man notices something is wrong, he’s often been managing it for years.
The language doesn’t exist for what he’s feeling. Men are not taught an emotional vocabulary. When something is off, the closest word available is often the harshest one: weak, broken, pathetic. None of those words are clinical. None of them are useful. And none of them are true.
The Pressure Men Are Actually Living Under
More and more, the concept of being a man has become an impossible standard. The pressure to be strong, in control, successful, and physically imposing all at once, all the time, is making things worse, not better.
Men in this position do one of two things: they give up entirely, or they obsess trying to meet an impossible bar. Neither path leads anywhere good.
Here’s what I see clinically:
- Men who restrict food or over-exercise not because they want to look a certain way, but because controlling their body is the one thing that feels manageable when everything else doesn’t
- Men who can’t slow down because stillness feels like failure
- Men who are high-functioning at work and quietly falling apart at home
- Men who have never once been asked by a doctor, a coach, or a friend how they are actually doing
This is not weakness. This is what happens when a person carries real pain with no language and no outlet for it.
Why Men Go Undiagnosed – and Untreated
The mental health system was not built with men in mind. Screening tools, symptom descriptions, even the way therapy is traditionally offered, all of it skews toward how women present. Men present differently.
Depression in men often looks like irritability, not sadness. Eating disorders in men often look like obsessive training and body composition tracking, not restriction. Anxiety in men often looks like overwork and control, not panic.
Medical professionals miss these signs constantly. In many clinical settings, they don’t even ask.
By the time a man arrives in my office, he has usually been told – directly or indirectly – that what he is experiencing is not a real problem. That he just needs to work harder, push through, be stronger.
He doesn’t need to be stronger. He needs someone who actually understands what he is carrying.
The data reflects this clearly:
- Men represent one in three eating disorder cases nationally but are diagnosed and treated at a fraction of that rate
- 6 million men in the US experience depression each year – most go untreated
- Men die by suicide at four times the rate of women, in large part because they do not seek help until it is intolerable
What Getting Better Actually Looks Like
Strength, redefined, is not about suppression. It is not about managing alone. It is not about performing wellness while quietly deteriorating.
Real strength – the kind that actually works, looks like this:
Naming it. Just saying, out loud or to yourself: something is wrong. That single step is where almost every man who gets better begins.
Finding the right clinician. Not every therapist understands the male experience. A provider who has dedicated training in how men present clinically, behaviorally, emotionally, is a different experience entirely than a general practitioner who has read a few articles.
Understanding what you’re actually dealing with. For many of the men I work with, what they’ve been calling weakness or failure is actually a diagnosable, treatable condition. Anxiety. Depression. An eating disorder. Muscle dysmorphia. These are not character flaws. They are clinical presentations with effective treatments.
Not doing it alone. The “figure it out yourself” approach has a ceiling. And for most men, they’ve already hit it, which is why they’re reading this.
If This Is You
If you’ve read this far, something in here landed.
You’re not weak. You’re someone who has been carrying something real, probably for longer than you should have, probably without enough support.
Hilltop Behavioral Health is a specialty outpatient practice in Summit, NJ. I founded it specifically to serve people who have been underserved; men, athletes, people whose presentations don’t fit the standard mold. We see clients in person and via telehealth across 21 states.
The first step is a conversation. No paperwork, no commitment. Just a call with someone who actually understands this population.
Are Men Weak?
I don’t think men are weak when they talk about pain, physical or emotional. I think most men wait until the pain is intolerable before they say anything at all, because somewhere along the way they learned that pain can only be expressed in very specific, narrow ways. Anything outside those ways gets read as weakness. So most men build a facade instead, and the facade becomes the whole presentation.
I sometimes wonder if that facade is really about safety, if performing “fine” is less about pride and more about not knowing what happens if you stop.
Here’s what I’d offer instead: what if you could just say it? “I failed at this.” “I’m not doing well right now.” Not as a confession, not as a defeat, just as a fact you’re allowed to state. Toughness isn’t the absence of that sentence. It’s often what comes right after it.
Schedule a Consultation → (973) 637-0572
Why Men Are Struggling More – Not Less
The pressure hasn’t eased. If anything, it has become more contradictory.
Men are told simultaneously to be tough and to be vulnerable. To be physically strong and emotionally available. To succeed professionally and be present at home. To ask for help while never appearing to need it.
These are not compatible demands. And the cost of trying to meet all of them at once without support, without language, without a clinical framework, is real and measurable.
This is not a character problem. It is a structural one. And it has a solution.
You’ve read enough to know something needs to change.
The men I work with are not weak. They are people who have been handed an impossible standard and told to meet it silently. When they finally have a place to bring what they’re carrying a clinician who understands, a framework that fits, things change.
That’s what we do at Hilltop.
Or call directly: (973) 637-0572
Mental Health Concerns in Men is Increasing Because:
A few things are converging at once, and none of them are new exactly, they’re just compounding.
Men are dropped into new environments, a job, a relationship, a city, a stage of life, and told, implicitly, to figure it out alone. There’s rarely a script for asking for help along the way, so most don’t.
Medical professionals compound this by not asking. Isolation, anxiety, disordered eating: these get missed constantly in men, not because the symptoms aren’t there, but because the questions never get asked in the first place.
And the standard itself is contradictory. Masculinity gets defined by physical strength, but then punished for having a body that shows effort. It rewards emotional restraint, then calls that same restraint a problem when it shows up as distance in a relationship. Fitness and wellness media sell an aesthetic ideal that’s virtually unreachable, and when men can’t meet it, the failure gets internalized instead of questioned.
Underneath all of it is a simpler rule most men absorbed early: emotion equals weakness, so don’t show it. Creativity, softness, uncertainty: none of it fits the mold. And carrying the expectation that you’re always the strong one, always the leader, leaves no room to say the truth when the truth is that you’re struggling.
None of this is a character problem. It’s a structural one, and it’s exactly what I built Hilltop’s Center for Men to address as a CEDS-C clinician who specializes in this population.
If this sounds like you, the first conversation doesn’t have to be a big one. Reach out today for a free consultation, or learn more about eating disorder treatment in New Jersey at Hilltop.
More for Men
- Center for Men
- Male Eating Disorder Treatment in NJ
- Disentangling the ‘I’m Fine’ Retort from Boys and Men
- From Boys to Men: Signs and Symptoms of Eating Disorders
- High Functioning Anxiety
