If you’ve never been to therapy, you might think it’s a lot like those scenes you see in TV and films. Steve Carrell, a therapist, is held captive and chained to a bed by his client in Hulu’s The Patient. Tony Soprano of HBO’s The Sopranos, who gets counselling twice a week, is a violent criminal. These types of characters convey an (unfortunately false) message: Therapy is only for people with serious problems.
The good news is that this perception is starting to shift, according to Gail Saltz, MD, a psychiatrist and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill-Cornell Medical College, although maybe not as quickly as experts would like.
“There’s often an internal feeling of stigma about therapy, and people often don’t want to go for that reason,” she says, adding that people from older generations or men, in particular, might be the most resistant to getting help for that reason. (Other times, she says, people are afraid to open up or feel like they can’t afford it.)
In fact, Dr. Saltz says that “pretty much anybody can benefit from really excellent talk therapy.” And if someone in your life is visibly struggling, it can be heart breaking to see them try to white-knuckle their way through the torment when you know a good therapist might be able to help.
While it’s important to keep in mind that therapy only ‘works’ if someone is open to the experience and genuinely wants to change, there are some things you can do and say to help show them the potential benefits. Here’s how to get someone to go to therapy.
1. Try to understand their reason for *not* going.
Just like your motivation for seeking out therapy is highly personal, so too are someone’s reasons for avoiding it. That’s why it’s super important to truly understand and empathise with why someone’s averse to the idea so you can figure out how to best approach them, Jody Thomas, PhD, a clinical psychologist and CEO of the non-profit Meg Foundation, says. Here are a few common scenarios Dr. Thomas and Dr. Saltz see in practice.
They feel like going to therapy is a sign of a personal failure.
Dr. Thomas says that she still sees a big cohort of people—again, a lot of older people and men—who just want to power through hardships. “We might think that only whiners go to therapy, or people who can’t handle their own stuff,” she explains. “This mentality leads a lot of people to have pretty sad and unnecessarily depressed and anxious lives.”
“People will often say, ‘My grandparents didn’t need therapy,’” she says, which might call for a counter-question on your part: “How would you have rated Grandpa as a partner or parent? How would you rate his concern for his well-being?”
They say they can’t afford it.
This one is a super legit reason for avoiding mental health help, both Dr. Saltz and Dr. Thomas say—but it’s something that can be worked around with a little effort. (More on that in a min!)
They’re worried about being judged or let down by a stranger.
As Dr. Thomas notes, media-derived associations with therapy also extend to what sessions might look like too. “Perhaps they picture a Freudian couch with someone sitting there and saying, ‘Tell me about your mother,’” she explains. “Some of that is fear of I don’t want to reveal these things about myself because I’m afraid this person is then going to have power control over me, that it’s a judge-and-jury situation—that someone is going to tell me everything I do is wrong. That’s not how this works.”