Is therapy worthwhile?
Is therapy worthwhile?
Hello,
Lately I have been overwhelmed with my schedule, finances and social life. I am always trying to improve my mental health. With all of this stress I am considering therapy, mainly for someone to talk, to process all my thoughts, and maybe help me develop ideas or come up with strategies to cope better. I have ADHD, Autism, and some other things if that helps anyone relate.
I have three main questions:
Has therapy helped you enough to be worth the time?
Is it very difficult to find a therapist you mesh with?
How do I find a therapist? From a doctor's referral? Online service? Through insurance? (I live in the United States.)
Any experience or advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
Edit: I just wanted to thank everyone for your help and support! I hope everyone is doing well and has seen positive changes. And I hope all these replies help other people besides myself. I'm feeling more positive and hopeful toward finding the right therapist. Your kindness is appreciated!
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It depends. Talk therapy works for a lot of people, but not all. But, it's almost always a good starting place. If you feel like you aren't making any progress with your therapist, you can always tell them that, and they can help you explore other options outside of psychotherapy. They could recommend a psychiatrist who can try medical therapy options with you. From there, if you still feel that you aren't making progress, your psychiatrist can possibly recommend medical operations such as ECT if you're still having trouble.
It doesn't always have to take this path, though. But I can absolutely recommend therapy as a launch pad.
For my own anecdote, I went to a therapist for several months, and after a while I felt like I was reaching a brick wall. And not due to any trouble with the therapist, but because I felt like I had milked therapy for all I could. He was able to refer me to a psychiatrist who then worked with me on finding an appropriate medication and we explored other venues from there. While I basically maxed out the gains I could get from therapy, I was still able to learn a lot of really useful things during that process anyway, which are still helpful to me today. So don't go into it with the expectation that you'll find yourself cured, but go into it with an open mind.
Thanks for the advice!
Short term I am just looking for help coping with huge amounts of stress. If I can find some effective strategies to use on my own then I might be okay. I feel I've already made a ton of progress in other areas of my mental health.
It is somehow comforting to know that if therapy doesn't solve all my problems then I don't need to feel like I "failed" therapy.
One resource I can recommend is Dr K on YouTube. He runs a channel called Healthy Gamer, and while his community is focused on gaming and gaming-related mental health issues, I think it's still pretty solid material even if you're not into games at all. For what it's worth, the extent that he'll do anything gaming-related in his videos is maybe make one or two gaming references per video, at most.
He goes really in depth into the psychology and neurology of various conditions and provides useful advice on how to mitigate those issues, yourself. He also does some really interesting talks and interviews with streamers and other content creators. He also usually provides links to different sorts of resources and further reading for different subjects, too. Definitely worth checking out, IMO. https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG
Sweet, thanks! I'm a casual gamer, but that sounds like a great resource. I'll check it out.
Even just having reminders or something to ground me in the meantime will really help I think.