Everyone is increasingly talking about having therapy for the issues they face in life, including times when we experience symptoms such as depression and anxiety. These mental health conditions affect us in a variety of ways, for example:
- Low mood
- Lack of energy
- Poor sleep
- Loss of appetite
- Reduced sense of motivation
- Feeling irritable, tense and stressed
- Being flooded with anxiety or having panic attacks
While it is important to consider medications for the treatment of these conditions, especially for people who are going through a more severe episode, the potential role of psychological treatment should always be explored. The wonderful thing about having a good therapy is that it not only helps treat your current difficulties, but also makes it much less likely that you will have problems again in the future, and even has the potential to improve the quality of your life at the same time.
One of the main reasons we develop difficulties with our emotions and relationships and can end up anxious and depressed, is that from an early age we learn some unhelpful patterns of thinking, along with distorted beliefs about ourselves and the world, and together these leave us vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed when we’re exposed to too much stress in our lives. Unfortunately, life has a habit of throwing extremely stressful situations at everyone, at least once (though usually more often than that) in the course of their life, hence why so many people have experienced anxiety and depression at some point.
Your therapist can help you learn to manage your symptoms differently and to understand why these have become a problem for you. This will both help you to recover from your difficulties and to develop new confidence about tackling daily life with a deeper understanding of yourself and other people. One of the most enjoyable aspects of my work is linking people up to therapists who I think will be able to help them, and in our clinic we have developed a process to assess each patient’s needs and then match them to the best psychological therapy approach, and this, in turn, allows us to identify the appropriate psychologist to offer them the treatment sessions.
Recently we have been able to expand this option to people living a long way from therapists (or travelling frequently for work) by developing an online psychological therapy service and I am very excited to be part of the team using technology to enable more people to have this treatment.
This article is for information only and should not be used for the diagnosis or treatment of medical conditions. myHealthSpecialist makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information in this article or found by following any link from this article. Please consult a doctor or other healthcare professional for medical advice.
Dr Tom Pennybacker, Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist
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