PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) – Everyone feels sad or anxious from time to time. But when is it time to seek professional behavioral health care?
Dr. Amelia McPeak, medical director of the behavioral health unit at Camden Clark Medical Center, said it’s important to know when you or someone you know is in a mental health crisis. If they say they want to harm themselves or kill themselves, McPeak said. If they feel completely hopeless and worthless. Or if they’re thinking about how they’re going to kill themselves.
In these cases, McPeak said you should contact the 988 crisis hotline.
Outside of crisis, McPeak said mental health issues may warrant seeking treatment when they begin to affect your ability to maintain healthy relationships or complete necessary tasks at work or home. Let’s say all of a sudden you’re arguing and being aggravated by your partner when you’re not normally, she said. Suddenly you don’t have the energy to get up and go to work.
McPeak said intense sadness and loss of interest in activities for more than two weeks could be diagnosed as a major depressive episode.
So if it lasts for several weeks in a row and interferes with your relationships and work, then you need to get treatment, McPeak said.
Outside of depression, McPeak said there are warning signs of psychosis that could be associated with other serious mental illnesses. People start showing erratic, agitated and aggressive behavior, she said. Talking about things like wanting revenge on people or wanting to hurt them. People don’t sleep at all, do they? Begin to isolate yourself and distance yourself from others.
Knowing the warning signs is one thing, but seeking treatment is an important step. McPeak said there are still a lot of things stopping people from seeking treatment. I think the bottom line is that there is still a lot of stigma around mental health issues, McPeak said. And people think they will be judged as somehow defective or less than if they knew they were seeking mental health treatment.
Despite this stigma, McPeak said seeking treatment can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Even mild mental health issues can be treated very effectively, she said. And people don’t realize that if you get treatment for your generalized anxiety disorder, for your major depressive episode, you can really thrive through that.
McPeak said people sometimes fear having a therapist tell them how to live their life. She points out that this is not the case. Therapy is about empowering you to make the best decisions for you, McPeak said. It’s not the therapist’s job to tell you and dictate every aspect of your life, or to have you play this child-parent role with your therapist. Your therapist is like a life coach who helps you figure out what you want to do for yourself.
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