I came to be the client of my therapist four years ago after an intervention with two friends, older ladies from church, one who happens to be a social worker.

I had been struggling for a long time with feelings of sadness, hopelessness, guilt and worthlessness. I had been engaging in self-injury for a long time and it was getting worse. I was suicidal off and on, never committing to a plan but just worn out from a traumatic, abuse-filled childhood, and the demands of life in general.

After the intervention, my friend the social worker interviewed therapists for me and found one that she thought would work well with me. (Ordinarily I suppose I should have done this process myself, but I was too depressed to care or to think properly.)

With their support I made the appointment and went to see the therapist.

Throughout the years, I’ve lost many people to depression, and I’ve had many people in my life who have struggled and survived. Although many were in their 20s, some were as young as 16 years old. The biggest problem is that depression isn’t visible like the chickenpox. It’s easy to hide and can show up out of the blue. One day everything could be wonderful and perfect and the next day could be a dark one.

Luckily, these feelings of sadness, anxiety, and depression are not as rare as they may seem; people like you and me may conceal them every day and no one would ever know it. Instead we wait until we’re home alone or with our loved ones to unleash the dragon. Because depression is so widespread, it’s important to remember that we are never alone. Someone always has it worse. We should be grateful for what we do have, and bad things will soon subside. Similar to the change of seasons, depression will bloom and wilt, but we can try to conquer it for good.

I have a lot of experience with depression — through family, friends, and even myself as a teenager. The biggest issue we face as young adults is that we don’t want to admit when we feel depressed, so we start to shut people out and ignore these powerful feelings that could end up destroying us.

I started psychotherapy for the wrong reasons.

A few people had suggested throughout the past couple years that I do it, and I thought I’d go to one session to say I’d done it and be done with it. Well, I went to that one session and told the counselor I needed help with stress. She talked to me about stress, but in ending the session, rather than asking “Do you want to come back?” asked “When do you want to come back?”

I have difficulty saying no to anyone, so I agreed to a time. The next session went nearly identical to the first, but during the third session she redirected the goal of our sessions toward me talking more. She had me take some tests (MMPI-2 and MCMI) and I wrote out a list of my goals for her.

She never directly told me, but eventually I picked up that she thinks I have social anxiety disorder. She started having me write down situations in which I felt anxious and what I was thinking and feeling at those times, but I didn’t really understand the point of it. I started realizing just how much anxiety had controlled my life, but I didn’t feel like doing this was helping me.

What this work did do, however, was make me really want to be able to do the things I was so terrified of doing.

There are a ton of good stories out there about people’s experiences with psychotherapy, and we want to feature them each week here on the World of Psychology. By shedding more light on the process of therapy, we believe it will make people more comfortable and perhaps get a better understanding of it.

So we’re putting out a call for any and all psychotherapy stories — from therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, clients and patients. If you have a story you want to tell and can do so in under 1,400 words, we’re interested.

We’re not looking (just) for salacious stories. We’re looking for stories that show the personal nature of therapy, and how it can help people.

Read on for details…

A week ago, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, questioning society’s reliance on medications to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He suggested that Ritalin has “gone wrong,” in that we simply rely too heavily on drugs to treat childhood disorders.

He starts off the op-ed, “As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.”

Like most professionals who are trying to boil down decades worth of research into a layperson-friendly length, Dr. Sroufe unfortunately glosses over the psychological literature and what we know (and don’t know) about ADHD medications.

I will say this before we begin… most children would benefit not just from being prescribed an ADHD medication, but also getting specific psychological treatment as well. Few child psychologists and child specialists would be happy if their patients were only getting the benefits of one type of treatment, and many would agree that parents are too quick to medicate before trying non-medication options.

Integrative medicine can be defined as “a healing-oriented discipline that takes into account the whole person — body, mind and spirit — including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of both conventional and alternative therapies.”

Complementary and alternative therapies used in integrative medicine can include acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal medicine, dietary supplements and others that give the clinician a wide array of treatments for difficult conditions. This is particularly true in the integrative medicine approach to eating disorders.

Eating disorders have been documented in adolescents and adults for many years. More recently, there is evidence that these disorders can also affect young children.

The cornerstones of an integrative medicine model for eating disorders includes some components that are found in every approach to the treatment of eating disorders, but may be used in a unique manner. Others are more specific to the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies. The most important difference in this model when compared to other treatment strategies is the philosophical underpinning of integrative medicine — that is, the belief in the self-healing nature of body, mind and spirit.

Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has been writing some very interesting blog posts over the past month (this one, and this one).

The theme is that there are very few drug treatment innovations coming for mental disorders. He said that this is due to changes in focus and funding at the big drug makers. He also adds that there are very few new “targets” (areas of the brain for drugs to influence) for drug researchers to explore.

When I read this I couldn’t help but think back to something Dr. Morgan Sammons (Aliant University) describes as the “paradoxes” of drug treatment for psychiatric disorders.

In a small clinical study published a few weeks ago, researchers didn’t find much difference between the three treatment groups of depressed subjects they studied — a group that received antidepressant medications, a group that received a specific type of not-commonly-practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy, and a group that received a sugar pill.

But there were some serious issues with this study from the onset, issues that call into question not only the generalizability of the results, but also their validity. It’s a shame that Reuters, who picked up on the study just yesterday, glossed over the methodology problems of the study, and instead just repeated the results as a shiny new established fact.

And easily lost in the discussion is the best result of them all — 16 weeks was all that was needed for most people in the study (who completed it) to find improvement in the symptoms of their depression, no matter what the treatment.

Let’s see what went wrong, and what the study actually tells us…

A “peer” in the world of mental health and substance abuse lingo means a fellow person who has also been diagnosed with a mental health or substance abuse disorder. Peers come together on their own in self-help support groups (both in the local communities and online) to help one another with emotional support and the knowledge that can only come from having been there themselves.

Benedict Carey writing in today’s New York Times details the impact of peers who go one step farther and act as peer counselors, helping people with mental disorders or substance abuse disorders with training that exceeds that of another layperson patient.

Peer counselors are an important component of America’s fragmented mental health care system, filling in the many gaps (especially in the public mental health system). These gaps are especially prevalent in the U.S. because there are usually two different public systems: one that treat mental disorders and one that treats substance abuse disorders. Few public community mental health systems have integrated these two components in systematic, comprehensive “dual diagnosis” programs.

A Dangerous Method, the new David Cronenberg movie — based upon the 2002 Christopher Hampton stage play entitled, The Talking Cure, (which in turn was based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method) — is not only about the relationships you see on the screen between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein, but a breathtaking metaphor for Freud’s depiction of the mind.

A successful effort on a multitude of layers, the movie offers us a rollercoaster ride in a car filled with a motley group of historical characters in psychology and psychoanalysis. The movie depicts the life of Jung and Freud’s relationship from the time they first met in 1907 until their professional relationship collapses in 1913 — a short 6 years. I saw a screening of the movie earlier this month.

But it would be wrong to characterize this as a story only about Jung and Freud’s relationship. Instead, it’s a larger-than-life tale about the first days of psychoanalysis and Jung’s career, set against the backdrop of pre-war Europe, artfully relayed on many different levels.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline staffs the national suicide hotline (1-800-273-TALK) and now has teamed up with Facebook, the world’s largest social network, to offer online crisis services to certain Facebook members.

I say “certain” Facebook members, because you can’t just log onto Facebook and seek out this free service. You first have to actually publicly post a comment somewhere — like on your wall — that you’re suicidal. Then you have to wait for a concerned friend or family member to read your post, click on the “Report” link, and report it to Facebook. Then, a Facebook staffer looks at the report and, if it meets its suicide criteria, will send the original Facebook user an email.

In this email from Facebook, the user will find a reminder about the national suicide hotline. But this special email also contains something you won’t find on the Facebook website, nor the website of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — a link to chat immediately online with a volunteer crisis counselor.

Facebook is providing the financial support for this new service, so not surprisingly it wants to limit its use. That’s a shame, because with the resources of a company like Facebook, they should make this sort of suicidal crisis chat service available to any of their users — without them first having to publicly come out and post about their suicidal intent.

This a great new resource and we commend both Facebook and the Lifeline for providing it as an option to their users. But the new service has a dark side as well…

I’ve extolled the virtues and benefits of psychotherapy for years. But therapy isn’t a cure-all, and it won’t help every person, with every problem, in every situation. In fact, it’s important to realize when going to see a therapist isn’t likely to help your situation much, because it can save you time, money and needless frustration.

Therapists, by their nature, tend to want to help every person who comes through their door. Even well-meaning therapists may not fully appreciate when they are largely going to be ineffectual in treatment because of the type of problem presented. After all, psychotherapy isn’t some magical elixir. Talking about some topics simply won’t do much to help the situation.

Here are five things that psychotherapy won’t help you much with.