Are you exploring the many types of mental health treatment options available today?
If you have a mental health condition, it’s a good idea to learn as much as you can about your treatment options. Thanks to years of research, you now have access to several exciting new types of mental health treatments.
I’d like to provide you with an overview of traditional therapy alongside the new types of therapy you may not have heard about.
Let’s get started.
Traditional Types of Mental Health Treatment
Cognitive behavioral therapy is one of the most widely used treatments among mental health professionals. You may not have known the official name for it, but you can recognize it by the change in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so you can function better in everyday living. With cognitive behavioral therapy, you and your therapist develop a realistic treatment plan with attainable goals and steps in reaching those goals.
You may have been given psychotropic medicines, such as anti-depressant or anti-anxiety, to help ease your mental health symptoms.
Medicines are great at doing just that, easing symptoms.
They have even greater success when you combine taking medicines with cognitive behavioral therapy. Therapies such as brainspotting, neurofeedback, and eye movement desensitization reprocessing are a few of the treatments on the forefront of mental health counseling. Other up and coming treatments include transcranial magnetic stimulation and cognitive control training.
And while hypnotherapy has been around for a while, therapists are finding new ways to utilize it in treatment.
1. Brainspotting
Brainspotting has a lot to do with your brain and your eyes.
Founder David Grand discovered that you can store trauma in your body, and that can alter the way your brain works.
In addition, he found that the way you position your eyes affects the way you feel. The brainspotting therapy, led by a trained therapist, can guide you to that negative stored emotion, allowing you to release it and move forward with positive emotions and reactions.
This is cool, right? It means that any of those painful, overwhelming, injurious, or fearful events that happen in a lifetime, and become traumatic events, can be treated in a safe method. It is considered a neurobiological tool that is great in assisting traditional therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy and alternative therapies such as acupuncture.
Other clinical therapies showing success in healing people with mental health disorders is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR.
Your brain can’t function properly and process information correctly when it experiences a trauma.
EMDR helps retrain your brain so that you can process information correctly and overcome negative emotions.
2. Neurofeedback Therapy
Neurotherapy or neurofeedback therapy also focuses on the brain.
If your brain waves are being sent out for inappropriate tasks, and at all the wrong times, neurofeedback could be an essential tool to enhance your therapies. Meaning, if you react to a situation with an inappropriate emotional reaction, this could help.
With neurofeedback therapy, you are hooked to a machine that reads your brainwaves and feeds them into computer software that your therapist can analyze. It can also send a message back to your brain in times that you may need a reset in a certain area, specifically those where mental health symptoms such as depression or anxiety are present.
Neurofeedback works with many different mental health disorders including bipolar, attention deficit disorders, and obsessive compulsive issues.
3. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
This sounds like something you might see while watching a Frankenstein movie.
But this is not scary at all. In fact, it is a non-invasive, safe and well-tolerated method of helping you with symptoms such as depression.
The Johns Hopkins Brain Stimulation Program offers services such as TMS. It is like MRI machines. The doctor places your head under a machine. The machine has a coil inside that sits over your head. That coil sends magnetic pulses through your skull and to the part of the brain that regulates mood.
The TMS treatments last for about an hour and in a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, the participants using TMS showed a significant improvement compared to those who were given a sham treatment, or placebo treatment.
4. Hypnotherapy
Yes, hypnotherapy has been around for many years.
However, it is cutting edge because it is more recently proving to be a valuable therapy for those suffering from mental health disorders. It’s a therapy making a huge comeback.
Many of you think being hypnotized is dangerous, not physically, but for your pride.
You fear being hypnotized and not remembering anything the hypnotist put you through. Thankfully, you are wrong, especially when discussing the use of hypnotherapy and mental illness. Pairing hypnosis with conventional mental health treatments can be very safe and very beneficial.
When you are hypnotized during therapy, you are simply taken to a heightened state of focus and self-awareness.
Hypnotherapy can be useful for many disorders, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and even eating disorders and addiction.
5. Cognitive Control Training
If this sounds like you can learn how to control your thoughts and focus on what you want instead of being easily distracted, you are right.
Cognitive control training teaches you how to do this using computer games. No, not grand theft auto type video games, but the ones that are geared specifically to help with brain training. This type of training helps you learn how to notice when you are losing focus on a subject.
It also helps you reign in your impulses and refocus on the task at hand.
There are even cognitive control video games being created that are helping older brains show improvements in the areas of focus and memory. Scientists say this can help with attention deficit disorders also.
Now that you have an overview of the types of mental health treatment options, you can determine which techniques fit your recovery process.
Finding a good therapist who can explain these methods in greater detail can help you in deciding which therapeutic path to take. Because these therapies have shown success in the field of mental health, your chances of finding the right method to fit your needs are excellent.