Another common need for counseling is for learning to cope with mental illness. Mental disorders and personality disorders are very common in present times. An extensive body of information has been made available in the past 10 years which has helped the public understand how common and how complex mental disorders are. Personality disorders are closely related cousins of mental disorders, and they are also very prominent in our society.
Everyone in the world can benefit from counseling because no one has perfect mental health, however, people with a mental or personality disorder genuinely need counseling and should not forego it. Mental illness is caused by harmful thought and behavior patterns. They were not always present within the person, meaning they began at some point when the person was influenced by adverse circumstances, but the patterns are so old and have been repeated so many times that they have gone subconscious. This is where the help of a professional counselor comes in.
A professional counselor’s job is to discover why a person does what they do, even when the person themselves does not understand why they do what they do. Then, they help the person understand how to correct their own harmful thought and behavioral patterns so that they can begin to welcome mental health back into their lives. Counselors are trained to ask the right questions to discover what kind of mental hardships their client is living with, and then they carefully guide them into healthier ways of thinking and responding to outside stimuli.
A common misconception about mental illness is that medicating is the ultimate solution. It is true that medication can curb the symptoms of a disorder that put the individual at immediate risk, however, cognitive behavioral therapy is ultimately the most important type of treatment for mental illness because it is the only shot at reversing the thought and behavior patterns that lead to the illness in the first place. If you are struggling with mental illness, find a counselor to lean on and work with as soon as possible.