How Do You Know When You Need Therapy?

The relationship a patient forms with their therapist (their Rappore, if you will) is unique: somewhere in between friend, confidante, Svengali, and priest, your therapist is the one person in your life who you can trust to be completely honest — to provide you with objective, fair, frank perspective when you have none. 

Who couldn’t use a sounding board like that — someone you can implicitly trust, someone you can be sure has your best interests at heart? Who doesn’t occasionally struggle with anxiety, depression, with feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness?  Who doesn’t feel apathetic or anti-social every now and then?  Who doesn’t obsess, or have thoughts they find intrusive?  Who doesn’t sometimes feel overwhelmed?  Undermotivated?  Enervated?  Listless?

The point is everyone has the occasional emotional or psychological issue, and a therapist could help them through those times.  Even if the cause of that issue is discreet — when there’s a specific life event causing the problem, a single haunting question that you can’t satisfactorily answer all by yourself — therapy work for you.  

The question, though, is when does someone need therapy?

We’re not going to list the symptoms that other websites have identified as worthy of therapeutic intervention: you can click on the links if you’re interested, but to be honest, you probably know intuitively what kinds of issues they’ll mention. 

What’s key to remember, in our opinion, is that it’s more a matter of degree than anything else.  Like we said above, no one’s perfect: everyone has problems.  You need to see a therapist when those problems become unmanageable — when they start to impact your ability to experience joy, to work, to socialize, to have fun — when your struggles with anxiety and depression begin to interfere with your everyday life.  When negative thoughts are so persistent and unavoidable that they begin to alter your mood — to rob you of the ability to be happy.  You don’t need to see a therapist if you feel sad or angry; but if those emotions begin to overwhelm you — if you can’t control your anger, or you find yourself crying spontaneously and frequently.

Unfortunately, if you’ve reached the kind of dire emotional nadir described above, you probably no longer have enough perspective to realize that you need to see someone. 

That’s the paradox of psychiatric intervention: if you really need it, you’re probably unable or unwilling to admit it. 

The beautiful thing about Rappore is that our Mental Fingerprint Assessment Test offers an objective analysis of your symptoms and their severity, helping us determine whether or not you actually need therapy; the results also help us identify which therapist on our roster is the best fit for your needs.  That’s why our test is so much longer than our competitors — because we’re getting a much more complete picture of your psychological complexion.  Plus, because Rappore works with so many insurance providers, we take away one of the big excuses people use to avoid going to see a shrink: cost. 

If you or a friend thinks they might need to see a therapist, we encourage you to start the process.  Or if you want to learn more about how Rappore works, click here.