When To Seek Therapy

Maybe you’ve been considering going to therapy for a while. Or maybe the year of 2020 itself has been a catalyst to seek therapy.

Reaching out to a psychologist or therapist takes courage. And if you’re second guessing if now is the right time, I’ve briefly mapped out a few indicators to help determine if it is the time to seek therapy. 

New or Worsening Mood Symptoms

Many people seek therapy for symptoms related to their mood, such as depression, anxiety, or irritability. If your symptoms feel overwhelming or uncontrollable, now may be the time to seek therapy. A psychologist or therapist can help determine if your current symptoms reflect a mood or other mental health disorder, and collaboratively plan an appropriate plan of action. 

If you have been experiencing mood symptoms for a while, but have noticed a recent increase of intensity, duration, or frequency of mood symptoms or changes in your behavior, now is definitely a good time to seek therapy.

Symptoms Impact Daily Life

When mental health symptoms begin to impact work or school, affect your relationships, reduce ability to care for your children or dependent parent, or impact your ability to start and complete tasks, it may be time to seek therapy. 

Depression can cause difficulty completing chores or find joy in things that were once pleasurable. Anxiety disorders can impact your ability to effectively communicate with others, perform at work, or quality of sleep. Trauma responses of hypervigilance or avoidance can cause disproportionate reactions, or disrupt your patterns of life by limiting your ability to engage with environments, places, or people. 

These are just a few examples to highlight when therapy is indicated. Your symptoms may be less or more severe. But if they are impacting your daily life, or even quality of life, now is a good time to seek therapy. 

Insufficient Strategies

A good time to seek therapy is when what you’ve tried before isn’t working. 

This could be coping strategies for stress or anger management. Ineffective communication strategies. Methods of problem-solving. Approaches to relationships. Patterns of behavior.

The complexity of the problem may have changed, making your strategies less effective. Alternatively, it may reflect a longstanding history of ineffective or insufficient strategies. Therapy can be a process of increasing strategies and insight. 

Thoughts of Suicide 

If you have active thoughts of self-harm that include an established plan and intent, it is time to take immediate action for crisis intervention. This could be walk-in to your local ER, calling a crisis hotline such as National Suicide Prevention: (800-273-8255) or Veterans Crisis Line for military veterans (800-273-8255 press 1), or calling 911. Tell someone. Now.

If you are experiencing thoughts of fleeting fantasies that you’d be better off dead, it is an indicator that you may be experiencing depression or are inadequately equipped to cope with current level of stress. If you are an older adult, or an individual facing a potentially fatal illness, thoughts about death can be normal; however, preoccupation with death is not. Now is the right time to seek therapy. 

Exploration and Curiosity

On a lighter note, therapy doesn’t just have to be for a mental health disorder. There is an exploratory aspect of therapy that can elicit a deeper understanding of why you think, act, relate the way you do. 

As a caveat, much of modern therapy is focused on empirically based treatments: therapies designed and studied for effectiveness of treating specific mental health disorders. Naturally this is how research and education for therapists have moved as the need for mental health care has increased over time. 

Therapy purely for the sake of increasing insight is most likely not going to be covered by your insurance, which requires a mental health diagnoses and needs to be deemed “medically necessary.” However, I wanted to make a brief note that even when therapy may not be indicated by the points I’ve listed above, I personally believe therapy can be a wonderful place for self-discovery and development. 

Alternative First Steps to Therapy

If contacting a therapist feels too uncomfortable, your Primary Care Physician/Family Doctor can be an excellent starting point. They should be able to provide you with a depression screen as part of your wellness exam. From there, they may recommend mental health treatment such as seeing a psychiatrist for medication management and/or a psychologist or therapist for psychotherapy. 

Additionally, if you are an active member of a church or religion, your local organization may have a pastoral care ministry to help provide spiritual support. They may also have a list of trusted community providers if you need traditional mental health treatment such as psychotherapy.  

You can also browse for therapists in your area on websites such as Psychology Today (my profile). Looking at profiles of providers to see their areas of expertise, training backgrounds, and other information listed may help reduce anxiety about contacting a therapist. And I assure you, most of us are very approachable :)

Please contact me if you are interested in getting started with therapy. I provide in-person therapy in Kirkwood, Missouri and via telehealth.