Getting access to therapy – not always easy

Sorry for the late posting – Telstra kindly cut my internet service off and I’ve only just managed to get it reinstated. Carrying on from yesterday’s post on how difficult it is to get help when you don’t want people to know you are depressed, it’s been my experience that it can be difficult to get therapy even when you do tell your doctor how you feel. In my case, way back in 1982, I was diagnosed with major depression after I became so unwell I couldn’t continue working. My family doctor put me on antidepressants, which took a while to kick in. After talking to a friend about how someone she knew had found therapy helpful for depression I went back to my doctor and asked to be referred to a psychologist.

His response was quite amazing. He told me that in his experience therapy didn’t help anyone and he wouldn’t refer me to it. So I had to find someone who would take me on without a doctor’s referral and pay for it myself. I found this therapy immensely helpful, but after doing research decided to change to a psychologist doing cognitive behavioural therapy as that was proven effective. I made sure to tell my doctor what I was doing. I later heard that this same doctor had refused to refer another young patient to therapy, much to the distress of his family, so I wasn’t the only one.

This story has a surprising ending. A few years after I started doing therapy I started seeing a new psychologist. Somehow we got on to the topic of my doctor. Then my psychologist dropped a bombshell. ‘He’s the highest referring doctor to our psychological service in the region,’ she told me. I was so shocked I asked her to say it again. Surely it couldn’t be the same doctor? But when I next visited him he told me it was true.
‘What changed your mind?’ I asked him.
‘I’ve seen such a change in you with therapy that now I refer a lot of my patients to the psychologists,’ he told me. He was a convert! I even lent him my copy of Feeling Good by Dr David Burns, and when I got it back it was clear from pages he’d marked that he’d actually read it. The upshot of this is that doctors may be more comfortable prescribing meds than referring a patient to therapy, but it’s worth getting therapy anyway and telling the doctor just how helpful it is. They may end up a convert too!