Psychotherapy
In my experience, talk therapy is the form of treatment that has the greatest possibility for lasting change. In addition to helping reduce the symptoms that prompt a patient to seek treatment initially, psychotherapy can help patients increase their understanding of how their feelings, thoughts, relationships and personal history all connect to inform the helpful and unhelpful patterns that make up their personalities.
Some patients ask if I practice a specific type of therapy such as CBT and while our discussions often include these concepts and interventions, I prefer to maintain an open-ended, broad approach to understanding all the factors that contribute to a person’s strengths or difficulties, including thoughts and feelings a patient may not be initially aware of having.
Child Therapy
When working with younger children, play therapy often takes the place of a traditional talk therapy. Because children often cannot explain the nature of the thoughts and feelings that trouble them directly, play therapy allows them to use the play materials in the office to gradually express their mental life while a therapist is observing, commenting and thinking about the play through an analytic lens. This allows ideas to enter the conversation that a patient may not initially be ready or able to express directly. When a child or adolescent is in therapy, it is helpful to also meet regularly with parents to discuss their observations and ongoing concerns.
Medication
For some patients, medication can also be helpful to reduce the severity of symptoms of anxiety, depression or ADHD. While these medications can be very helpful and sometimes even life-saving, in my experience they rarely get to the root cause of the difficulties that bring patients into treatment or produce the lasting change that patients are looking for when they seek out a psychiatrist. Following an initial evaluation, we can discuss whether adding a medication would support your treatment goals. I generally take a conservative approach to medications and prefer to use the lowest effective dose and fewest number of medications. In general, I prefer to do both the therapy and medication management myself and not to “split treatment” with a outside therapist.