You deserve to live a healthy and happy life. When life gets you down, there are people who can help (and want to). Unfortunately, our mental healthcare system can be confusing to newcomers. This guide aims to answer some basic questions and help you find a way into care.
First, if you are in crisis or thinking of hurting yourself: please call, text, or chat with 988 (in the United States) or your local crisis line. You matter, and you can get through this.
Disclaimer: I am only a layperson so please take this guide with a grain of salt and trust your expert care team more than me.
Health is more than just physical fitness, and life is more than just continued existence. Having good mental health empowers you to do more with your life and be more satisfied. It enables a virtuous cycle of growing motivation, strengthening relationships, and deepening meaning, among many more.
When mental health gets out of whack, there are many ways to course correct, and many ways to maintain those improvements into the future. Since it’s so vital, it’s worth some investment of time and effort.
Fortunately, there are many ways you can improve your mental health. Getting good sleep, exercising, walking, practicing mindfulness, eating well, and spending time with friends or family are all great self-care tools, among many others. But you probably already knew that.
For more serious issues that are harder to address on your own, there are a myriad of professionals who are trained to help, from medical doctors to talk therapists.
Broadly speaking, mental health professionals can be categorized into those who can prescribe medicine and those who can’t.
Mental health professionals who can prescribe medicine include the following (from most-to-least training required). They usually specialize in psychiatric medicine, but may also bring talk therapy techniques into their sessions.
Mental health professionals who cannot prescribe usually focus more on talk therapy. Their sessions are typically longer and more frequent than a medical provider, so they can go into more depth. They usually hold a master’s or doctoral degree and use a variety of techniques. For example:
See also: the Mental health professional Wikipedia page.
How to best start mental healthcare for the first time depends a lot on your situation, but here are some general guidelines.
If you absolutely don’t know where to start, consider finding a talk therapist first. Ideally, they can direct you to see a medical provider if it seems helpful.
Some places to look for providers include:
As you search for a provider, ask yourself questions like the following to narrow down your options:
I wouldn’t worry too much about the specific techniques a provider uses at this stage, as long as they mention some experience in your concerns. It’s more important to start care than to prematurely optimize it.
It may take a while to get an intake appointment, in part because it involves a clinician committing to take on a new patient. Fortunately, once you’ve gotten in the first time it’s usually easier to schedule follow-ups.
Intake appointments will often involve some amount of getting to know you and getting to know your provider. They will probably perform a semi-structured history—the classic question being “what brings you in today?”
Don’t be concerned if you feel a little lost—therapy techiques are often a little unintuitive and subtle. Mental health treatment can be a little challenging at times when you face whatever’s holding you back, but the long-term goal is to grow past those obstacles.
Mental health is incredibly personal, so it’s natural that mental healthcare would be too. To be an effective team, you and your provider need to work well together. This is sometimes called the therapeutic alliance or healing power of the relationship.
If you’ve given your provider a chance and still don’t have a strong relationship, it is completely reasonable to seek another one. Your existing provider may be able to help you with this, or you can use the above techniques for finding a new one.
Obviously, when you’re in need, it’s not easy to find and screen a bunch of practitioners. In my opinion, it’s totally reasonable to start with whoever you can get in to see, and dial in the perfect fit over time.