Today we’d like to introduce you to Augusto Blanco.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My name is Augusto Blanco, and I specialize in men’s mental health, a field with far fewer trained clinicians than it needs.
My story starts in an unexpected place. At seventeen, I was like most young people at that age: uncertain about the future but feeling the pressure to choose a path. It was overwhelming to think that that choice was going to determine what I would do for the rest of my life, with all that that entailed.
I’ve always been very pragmatic, and my reasoning then was no different: psychology felt flexible enough to grow with me. Research, private practice, working with groups or individuals, content creation… psychology could accommodate all of it. That logic, combined with the fact that my mother had studied psychology and confirmed the program near home was one of the best in the country, sealed the decision. It turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever made.
What I didn’t anticipate was how personal the journey would become. Running parallel to my university years was something I now recognize in young men constantly: the absence of strong male models and a clear answer to the question of who you’re supposed to be. What’s worth keeping, what’s outdated, what reflects confidence versus what reflects insecurity and fear, nobody was teaching that clearly.
I had to learn it the hard way, through years of painful trial and error, walls I kept hitting, lessons that cost me more than they should have.
But eventually, brick by brick, I built the foundation I was looking for… the internal security, the social skills, the capacity for real connection. I found the relationship I wanted. I became, recognizably, the person I had been trying to become since I was a teenager. My younger self would be proud of my current self. That’s not something most people can say today.
However, the turning point came when I read about a young man with a background similar to mine who, unable to find his way through those same struggles, took his own life. Reading that line on the TV made something click. The two threads of my story (the personal and the professional) converged into a single direction.
From that moment, I committed fully to men’s mental health. I began building a concrete knowledge base around the male psyche: how we see the world, what works, what doesn’t, and how to teach what I had learned through experience. I reached out to the few professionals that delved in the field and learned from their projects and presentations. That work became manhelpingmen.com: my private practice, where I work with men of all ages navigating the issues that affect us men disproportionately (substance use, anger issues, isolation and suicide), problems that very few clinicians have chosen to study and address with intention.
Once you know exactly what needs to shift, you can focus your energy precisely where it matters and immediately get results. The men I’ve worked with had already tried medication, multiple therapists and alternative therapies for years with little success. Working with me, someone who had done the work beforehand and understood our world differently, allowed them to get to where they wanted to, sometimes in weeks.
This has showed me that this truly works, and that’s what drives me day by day.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has never been a smooth road… and low-key, I think that’s part of what makes the work so meaningful.
On a personal level, the early years were hard in ways I didn’t fully have language for at the time. There were economic pressures that made sustaining my studies a constant challenge. There was a persistent sense of not fitting in, of watching others connect easily while I felt like I was on the outside looking in. There was even an ongoing health condition (one I still manage today) that left me constantly fatigued, sleeping far more than I wanted to, and fighting for the energy to show up to my obligations in the way I needed to.
Those experiences left marks that haven’t fully disappeared – wounds that healed but I can still feel. What they gave me, though, was determination. I didn’t want to stay stuck. I wanted to understand why some people seemed to navigate life with ease while others, myself included, kept hitting the same walls.
On a professional level, the challenge was different but equally real. Men’s mental health remains a vastly understudied area, and when I began moving in this direction, the available information was limited. But beyond the scarcity of resources, there was something harder to navigate: stigma. Not from clients, but from within professional circles. Choosing to specialize in men’s mental health can invite assumptions about your values or beliefs that have nothing to do with your actual work. Being prejudged by colleagues before you’ve even made your case is a particular kind of frustration, especially when the mission is simply to help a population that has been underserved for too long.
What kept me going was finding the people who got it. Colleagues, professionals from adjacent fields, people who could see clearly what this work is actually about and why it matters. Those connections reminded me that the resistance wasn’t a sign I was wrong, it was a sign I was working on something that needed to exist.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Man Helping Men?
Man Helping Men is two things at once: a specialized clinical practice and a growing content platform dedicated entirely to male mental health.
On the clinical side, I work one-on-one with men of all ages (I’ve worked with clients as young as seventeen and as old as seventy-five) helping them resolve the specific challenges that brought them to therapy. My core areas are anger and emotional regulation, relationship difficulties, couples therapy, and men who are navigating the dating world without a clear roadmap, whether that means rebuilding after a breakup, understanding social dynamics, or simply learning how to connect with others in a way that actually works for them.
On the content side, manhelpingmen.com is being built as a reference point for quality information on male mental health written by a clinician who has not only studied these issues formally and at length, but lived them as well. That combination is rarer than it should be. A man who finds one of my articles at two in the morning, not ready to pick up the phone and call a therapist, can still walk away with something real and useful. That’s the goal.
What sets me apart is precisely that dual foundation: rigorous clinical training in a field that most practitioners have never intentionally studied, combined with the lived experience of a man who faced these same walls and found his way through them. I don’t work from theory alone. I know this terrain from the inside and that’s what allows me to move with clients more efficiently than a generalist ever could.
What I’m most proud of is simple: the men who came to me after years of unsuccessful attempts elsewhere, and got to where they wanted to be, sometimes in just a few weeks of work.
My services include individual therapy via telehealth, which means location is never a barrier. I’m also trained and certified in couples therapy. Beyond direct client work, I consult with other therapists who are looking for guidance when working with male clients, and I’ve begun training professionals in what I’ve built over the years. This August I’m delivering a virtual training to therapists specifically on engaging male clients effectively, a skill set the field has been slow to develop.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
I’ll be honest, answering this with “helping people makes me happy” would be true, but incomplete. So I’ll give you the real version.
What genuinely makes me happy is the quality of the relationships I’ve been able to build. Playing board games like Spirit Island or Dune with people I actually want to spend time with. Family moments that feel easy now, tensions that took years to resolve finally behind us… something I credit in large part to the personal work I’ve done and the partner I get to share my life with.
Having a body I’ve trained and taken care of, one that lets me go hiking whenever I feel like it, join friends for sport, or simply show up to my daily gym session or swim. That reliableness is important to me as someone who grew up overweight.
And music. I spent years teaching myself piano, and somewhere along the way it stopped being practice and became something I actually do. Now I can play and sing with my girlfriend, which is one of my favorite things about the life I’ve built!
None of this happened by accident. It’s the result of the same work I now help other men do. That’s probably what makes it meaningful on top of being pleasant.
Pricing:
- Individual Therapy – 60 min $90
- Couples Therapy – 90 min $150
- Clinical Consultation – 60 min $100
- Access to Articles on Website – free forever
Contact Info:
- Website: https://manhelpingmen.com
- Instagram: @man.helping.men
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Man-Helping-Men-Psychologist-for-Men/100084925248874/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augusto-blanco-/
