When is it necessary to see a psychologist?

In our life we continuously have to confront ourselves with different levels of problematic situations, many of them we are able to cope with and solve. Others are more complex and require more time to be solved. These problems are part of our life and are necessary in order to grow through the acquisition of new strategies to solve problems.

But what happens when the problem becomes too big, or we see it as unbearable? What can we do once we have tried all kinds of solutions and we keep finding ourselves stuck in the same situation over and over? Who should we see when the suffering is beyond our strengths, when our fears block us or limit our daily life? When we are blocked inside a thought and that thought becomes stronger than us, when our mind becomes unable to control our body?

Every psychological problem must be limited in time. When our symptoms tend to persist we risk to making them become chronic, to have to live all our life in the company of our problem, if not complicating the situation even more.

The intervention of a psychologist is the normal path towards a solution in all those cases where we haven’t been able to solve the problem by ourselves or with the aid of our network, all those situations where we experiment problems in dealing with our private lives or in our work environment, in relating with ourselves or with others.

The psychologist, being a “professional of the mind”, is an expert that has undergone a specific training to learn how to cure and solve different psychological problems. Going to a psychologist is taking care of our own health; it’s improving our own quality of life.

The Psychologist is a professional at the client’s service.

Sometimes we forget that when we go to a psychologist we are requesting a service, sometimes specialistic, other times more generic, but we are always paying someone for his work.

It's a fundamental right of the patient to be able to have information about the type of work / treatment that he will undergo.

The patient must have a clear idea of which goals the work is proceeding towards, in which way they will be achieved and therefore which are the underlying concepts that structure the change process.

It's the therapist’s duty to agree on the above with the patient, in order to constantly evaluate and monitor the progress or impasse of the therapy.

How much does it cost to go to a psychologist?

Being a private profession the costs of the sessions vary depending on the type of service and therapy.

A determining factor is the frequency of the sessions: usually approaches that require more sessions in a week will have lower prices (for a single session) compared to approaches where the sessions are weekly or every two weeks. Although, if we compare the total cost in a larger time span, we will notice that there is an economic advantage in the later type of therapy. The advantage will be due to a lower expense in the long term and also (as in the strategic therapy) in a shorter time for the therapy to be completed.

Another important aspect regarding the "costs", not from an economical point of view, is the emotional and psychological load that comes into play in the therapeutic sessions.

This is absolutely not to be undervalued!

We can easily perceive how a work of global personality reorganization will regard a great effort and suffering on the patient’s behalf, this is something that often coincides in delineating a low efficacy and efficiency of the approach. A brief therapy aimed toward the solution of a problem will, instead, tend to solve in the simplest way the disorder, without the pretentious idea of having to "change" the individual, but only to modify the dysfunctional system that sustains the problem.