When is it time to seek help for your mental health?

Everyone feels sad or anxious from time to time. But when is it time to search for professional behavioral health care?

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) - Everyone feels sad or anxious from time to time. But when is it time to search for professional behavioral health care?

Dr. Amelia McPeak, the 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’re making statements that they want harm themselves or kill themselves,” McPeak said. “If they’re feeling completely hopeless and worthless. Or if they are having thoughts of how they’re going to kill themselves.”

In these cases, McPeak said you should reach out to the 988 crisis hotline.

Outside of crisis, McPeak said mental health issues can warrant seeking treatment when they start to affect your ability to have healthy relationships or perform necessary tasks at work or at home. “Let’s say, all of sudden you’re arguing and aggravated by your significant other when you aren’t normally,” she said. “All the sudden you don’t have the energy to get up and go to work anymore.”

McPeak said experiencing severe sadness and a loss of interest in activities for more than two weeks could be diagnosable as a major depressive episode.

“So if that lasts for several weeks in a row and is interfering with your relationships and work, then, you need to get treatment,” McPeak said.

Outside of depression, McPeak said there are warning signs for psychosis that could be associated with other severe mental illnesses. “People starting to show sort of erratic, agitated and aggressive behaviors,” she said. “Talking about things like wanting to seek revenge on people or wanting to harm people. People not sleeping at all, right? Starting to isolate and pulling themselves away from other people.”

Knowing warning signs is one thing, but actually seeking treatment is a big step. McPeak said there’s still a lot preventing people from seeking treatment. “I think the fundamental thing is there’s a lot of stigma still about mental health conditions,” McPeak said. “And people think that they will be judged as sort of somehow defective or less than if people know that they’re seeking mental health treatment.”

Despite that stigma, McPeak said seeking treatment can make a huge difference in people’s lives. “Even mild mental health conditions 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, then you can really thrive despite that.”

McPeak said people sometimes worry a therapist will tell them how to live their lives. She stresses this isn’t 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 part of your life, or to make you in this child-parent role with your therapist. Your therapist is like a life coach that helps you figure out what you want to do for you.”

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