All About Mental Heath Counselling, What it is and the Types of Problems it can Help

What is Mental Health Counselling?

Mental health counselling is therapy that helps individuals cope with emotional, behavioural, and psychological problems.

The goal of mental health counselling is to provide a safe and supportive environment where people can discuss their thoughts, feelings and concerns with a trained professional.

Counselling can also help individuals learn better coping skills, manage their symptoms and improve their overall quality of life.

There are various different types of counselling available including

• Cognitive approaches which focus on changing negative thought patterns and behaviours to improve mental health.
• Psychodynamic therapies that explore how unconscious thoughts and feelings affect your behaviours.
• Humanistic therapies which focus on your self-development and growth.

Although all mental health counselling approaches seek to achieve the same outcome, you may need to explore different methods to find what suits you best.

Benefits of Mental Health Counselling

Mental health counselling has numerous benefits, including:

Improved Mental Health: Counselling can help you develop the coping skills to deal with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

This can help You feel more in control of your emotions and improve your overall mental wellbeing.

Better Relationships: Mental health counselling can also help you improve your relationships with others by developing better communication skills, setting boundaries and improving your ability to empathise with others.

Increased Self-awareness: Counselling can help you become more self-aware and gain a deeper understanding of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

This can help to identify negative patterns and work towards positive changes.

Stress Reduction: Counselling can teach you how to manage stress and reduce its impact on your life.

You will become more relaxed and better able to cope with daily challenges.

Improved Quality of Life: Mental health counselling can help to improve the overall quality of your life by addressing issues that may be holding you back from achieving your goals.

Counselling Versus Medication

Mental health counselling and medication both seek to alleviate mental health problems, but using very different models of mental distress.

We, in common with the British Psychological Society (BPS), consider that the mental health problems experienced today are the result of what has happened in the past.

Furthermore, it is what we believe our past experiences mean (to us) that produces the way that we feel about them.

This perspective is known as the Power Threat Meaning Framework.

The medical profession, on the other hand, tend to regard emotional distress and its presenting symptoms, as being due to faulty chemistry, usually in the brain.

This biomedical models of mental illness provide the rationale for prescribing medications that are claimed to address these chemical faults.

It is important to be aware, however, that medications are specifically designed to reduce the severity of symptoms rather than solve the underlying causes of mental health problems.

Overall, whilst medications can be very useful for helpng people to cope with distress, mental health counselling is at least as, if not more, effective in the long term.

Which Counselling Approach is Most Effective?

Clinical evidence suggests that different people find different types of mental health counselling effective for different reasons.

Whilst the inventors of each new type of therapy often claim that their new system is “better” than the others, there is little evidence to support these claims.

In fact, clinical research suggests that the quality of the therapy relationship may be the most important factor in determining a good therapy outcome.

Here at Lee Psychology we tend to help people to overcome their mental health issues using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) because of it’s evidence-based approach.

On the other hand, some clients prefer the more adaptive pluralistic therapy that Joan offers as this can be tailored to your needs as your sessions progress.

In addition to CBT and Pluralistic therapy, we are also able to offer:

• Online Therapy,
• Psychoanalysis,
• Self Directed Therapy and
• The CORE Programme which is a structured, 12 session course of therapy combining CBT and behavioural change science.

You can find out more about these different counselling programmes by clicking on the links above.

What Happens During Mental Health Counselling Sessions?

Mental health counselling sessions involve exploring your feelings, understandings and coping strategies that you use to manage your problems.

We will treat you with positive regard and be non-judgemental about your problems or behaviours.

Effective mental health counselling should help you to think about your problems from different perspectives and explore why you attribute certain meanings to certain experiences.

Overall, a course of counselling should help you to come to terms with whatever has happened to you in the past as well as develop new and more adaptive coping strategies going forward.

Arrange your FREE initial consultation here.

If you’d like to find out more about overcoming or recovering from any of your mental health problems then why not arrange a free initial consultation with us.

During this consultation we will discuss your particular issues and the different types of mental health counselling we offer without you having to commit to any counselling going forward.

The consultation lasts around 50 minutes and is a great opportunity to meet with either Paul or Joan and decide if you would like to proceed with any support.