Getting the right therapist

A lot of people suffering from a mental illness are often made to believe therapists are a one size fits all. Which is the furthest from the truth. Some patients may not know it is okay to ask for a different therapist. However, for some due to long wait list you may be stuck with a particular therapist or fear asking for a different due to the length of time you wait to get your initial appointment. Long waitlists and the lack of therapist is not getting any better by the elimination of psychological care from some hospitals. For most, myself included in the beginning of looking for mental help, may think the hospital route is the only way to get the help you need. Little did I know there are alternative ways to get the help you need without having to rely on the hospital’s psychology department. Waitlists are much better at clinics independent of the hospital, but hospital don’t tell you this when they place you on a year plus waiting list. For me if I would have known about therapy outside of the hospital setting, would have gotten me the help I needed sooner and probably would have changed the path my life has taken. You need to become your own advocate now more than ever, and standup and telling your doctor you don’t want to wait on a list for over a year to get care and instead you want the referral for outside clinics as well.

Beyond getting a therapy appointment, getting the correct therapist is essential. For me finding the correct therapist involved finding someone that could relate to me, someone that had shared interests, and someone that wasn’t going to judge me and was going to listen. Beyond these characteristics, my therapist showed she was the right one for me in two incidents. The first being showing vulnerability and divulging she had gone through a mental health struggle. The second was when my therapist listened and could tell my treatment plan at the time was incorrect and she began to transform into my number one advocate. A third time my therapist showed she was the right therapist for me was when she told me she had been thinking about me and was worried about me. This to me showed that this was someone that generally cared about me and my mental health.

Unfortunately for some people, they stay with a therapist that is wrong for them for fear of not being able to get a different therapist because of the high demand for mental health treatment. Advocating for yourself is essential if you don’t feel your current therapist is right. Getting with the right therapist can truly change your mental health treatment for the better.  In my work experience of working in a hospital, I unfortunately encountered nurses that just like some therapists are only there for a paycheck and don’t care about their patients. After second suicide attempt, I confided in one of my co-workers that was a nurse that instead of supporting me told me she would show me how to do it right the next time. This unfortunately is an all-too-common occurrence in the healthcare industry. With patient with mental illness being looked down upon and being seen as failures.