Your Doctor Recommended Therapy: Now What?

There has been a sharply increasing awareness of the relationship between mental health and physical well-being. Doctors and other health care providers include more mental health screening in their initial intakes as well as attunement to changes in mental health in long-term patients.  

So, what if your doctor or healthcare provider recommends that you see a therapist?  What are your next steps?  

Wait, Why Does My Doctor Want Me to See a Therapist?  

It’s important to understand why your doctor might make such a recommendation to you. They may want to offer you that option if you have received a serious diagnosis or someone in your family has and they believe some support will be helpful. If you are struggling with an alcohol or drug dependence, psychotherapy would be strongly encouraged.  Similarly, you may have an ongoing health problem that worsens with excessive stress, like heart disease, diabetes, asthma, migraines, or IBS. 

Barring some specific issues, there are many ways that our mental health can impact our physical health. Stress, for example, can be emotional or mental but can present with physical effects on our body. We all experience changing levels of stress, some of them caused by particular adverse life events, or by things happening at work or at home. Sometimes world events can have a corrosive effect on us, and depending on our personal histories, some national or world events hit harder.   

Your doctor may have noticed some substantive changes in your physical health that are not the result of a discrete disease process. Changes like an increase in blood pressure, unexplained weight gain or weight loss, the appearance of headaches, GI problems, insomnia, muscle aches, or some vague distress.  

Or they may notice a change in your demeanor, e.g., you seem more irritable, more distracted, you’re canceling appointments or other uncharacteristic behaviors. This could prompt your primary care provider (PCP) to ask what else is happening in your life and what stressors you are experiencing. 

An Example of When a Doctor Might Recommend Therapy

Jim

Let’s look at an example.  Jim, a 38-year-old man, married with two young children, enjoyed reasonably good health.  But after the round of layoffs at his job, Jim began to suffer some insomnia, found himself eating after meals, and increasing his alcohol intake.  He also noticed a stiff neck that plagued him intermittently during the day.  He went to his PCP who first ruled out any neurological or musculoskeletal cause for the stiff neck, and then asked Jim what was happening in his life. Jim, surprised by his sudden vulnerability, told the doctor how stressed he was, that his job was on the chopping block and there was no way to know if or when he would be let go.  He got teary-eyed when he expressed how vital it was to be an effective, productive person and he couldn’t let anyone down.  His doctor remembered from his medical history that his dad got seriously ill at a young age and Jim took on several after-school jobs to help the family. Jim’s dad died shortly after his diagnosis. It was a traumatic loss for the teenage Jim. Was Jim suffering from anxiety related to both his past experiences AND the current job uncertainty? Was he experiencing stress today plus reexperiencing that teenage trauma?  The doctor thought as much and suggested that Jim speak to a therapist.  Jim agreed.  

Okay, So I’ll See a Therapist.  What’s Next?

The steps to finding a therapist can differ for everyone, but generally, when therapy is recommended by a doctor, your next steps will look something like this:

You may never have sought therapy before, or if you did it may have been a short-term treatment focused on a specific problem. Beyond insurance and logistics, several factors are essential when choosing a therapist:

1. The therapy space should be a safe space, where you can feel free to say whatever is on your mind, a space where you will not be judged.  

2. The therapy space should also be a place to examine the root of the problem, whatever the problem might be.  Sometimes some of the physical changes - weight gain, upset stomach, headaches - are what we notice first, and it can take some time, with a skilled therapist, to get to the emotional issues underneath. Often, we repeat patterns that are less than adaptive because the issues we face have not been sufficiently processed and understood.  A therapy that addresses these root causes can be ultimately more effective in helping you arrive at more understanding and better choices in handling life’s stressors than a short-term treatment that addresses symptoms alone.

3. Your choice of therapist should be led by a sense of comfort and ease with the person you select.  A therapeutic rapport can take some time, but one can get an initial impression of a potential therapist within a couple of sessions.

4. Ask questions. You have the right to know what sort of therapy is practiced by your potential therapist and if it feels right to you. 

5. Take your time.  You are not obligated to choose to work with the first person you meet.  It is in your best interest to have more than one initial session, unless you feel very confident with the first person you meet. It is entirely up to you.  

Conclusion

It’s not an exaggeration to say that our physical health is affected by our mental health. Many times our persistent patterns, those that feel like our best coping strategies, are behaviors that are less than adequate when our acute stressors combine with thoughts and feelings that have persisted from childhood.  Seeking Therapy That Sticks, the kind that examines past history and focuses on how it impacts the present can lead to finding better, more adaptive strategies to cope with those acute stressors. It can also engender more insight to help meet the challenges yet to come.  

Visit our directory of low-cost providers in your area to begin your journey to lasting change.