Before we get into this topic, I just wanted to point out to you that if you have a medical health emergency the best thing that you can do is get yourself off to your nearest healthcare clinic, hospital or urgent care centre,  if you feel like you are at risk of harm in some way. I’m trained in a very specific form of therapy which is classed as an alternative therapy called neuro-linguistic programming or NLP. This is something that I specialise in offering to children and young people through a company called NLP4Kids. There are also lots of other therapies available through CAMHS which is the child and adolescent mental health service. This is a service that can be accessed by the NHS meaning that if you’re here in the UK, you will get it for free and there is a whole ton of other healthcare providers who have private services available that might be of interest to you.

In terms of finding the fastest route to solving your mental health issues, it would be easy to say medication would be the way to go! Here’s why people think that medication is the fastest route to solving your mental health challenges. All you have to do is take the tablets that the doctor prescribes to you in order to get better. Here’s the downside to that very often doctors and healthcare providers are reluctant to provide medication for mental health issues to young people and that’s partly because diagnosing young people with mental health conditions is quite tricky. 

Sometimes you have like fluctuating emotions because of things like puberty so that’s why we tend not to see mental health diagnoses until later on in life so it seems like the magic pill would be the fastest way to solve all your problems. However, it is difficult for doctors to formally diagnose you with an issue that requires medication. It can be also tricky with medication because sometimes you might not get the right fit straight away so you might go for three months waiting for the medication to kick in only to find it wasn’t the right option and you have to try something else, this delays your time in getting the right help and support that you need. 

The other thing to think about with medication is that it’s not going to solve your mental health problem. It’s going to deal with the symptoms of your mental health problem but it isn’t going to go in there and do the work that’s required to get to the core of the problem. For example, you may have a phobia of dogs. Whilst the mediation makes you feel less anxious, it won’t resolve the problem itself. This takes me to the most likely fastest way and that is by using therapy specifically cognitive behaviour therapies are really effective for children and young people so you may have heard of CBT and you may even have been through CBT.

One of the first things that’s super important in any kind of therapy that you might look into in the future is your relationship with the therapists themselves. If you feel like ‘I like this person. I’ve got a good connection with them’. It doesn’t matter what kind of therapy this is, the chances are it’s probably going to work really well for you because that connection that you have with your practitioner or your therapist is very often like of helping you to solve your problem the tools that they use are important and it might be that something like a cognitive behavioural therapy isn’t quite the right fit for you. There are loads of others; there’s art therapy, psychotherapy, psychology or psychiatry. There are all sorts of different therapeutic interventions that would be worth while exploring and finding out a little bit more about them.

NLP is a type of cognitive behaviour therapy but it works slightly differently. It’s classed as more of an alternative form of therapy and it’s really about teaching you different strategies and techniques that you can use when you’re in challenging situations or you just need to get on top of that self-talk that’s going on in your head. In terms of finding the fastest way to help you with your mental health challenges, my opinion is actually that we do a combination of both NLP and medication. Let me tell you why that can be really effective for you. When we jump straight in with something like CBT and someone’s in a really low depressed state, they might not be receptive to the techniques that are actually going to be super helpful for them so by being medicated that might give them enough of a lift to be able to really engage and get the most from those methods and then be able to work on the core of the problem.

There is one other thing I want to share with you that I believe is going to accelerate whatever treatment form you choose in helping you to quickly get rid of mental health and emotional issues and that is taking responsibility for finding the solution and putting whatever those tactics or strategies might be into action. I’m going to share a story with you quickly to highlight what it is that I’m saying here. I had a client who was struggling with anxiety and depression. She was a teenager and she was seeking to get medication for this but it was not as yet prescribed and she was a long way away from getting through the child and mental health system, CAMHS. In the meantime, she came to work with me and we were putting some NLP strategies in place that would help to support her until she reached a place where perhaps there may be an offer of medication on the table.

This particular young lady was at this point in her life where she was depressed and she was doing nothing, absolutely nothing all day every day. When she came to see me I gave her some suggestions of things that would help her to start making progress in the right direction, some were quite practical. Whilst I was providing her with strategies, she never actually put them into practice. She was so fixated on the idea of receiving medication to control her anxiety and depression, it was almost like she was coasting through our sessions waiting to get to the day that somebody would give her a magic pill.

Even if we reach a point where somebody prescribes some kind of serotonin-boosting medication that is never going to cure the real problem, it’s just going to deal with the symptoms which means then that she ends up keeping whatever it was that caused the mental health issue in the first place. Sometimes there is going to be a need for you to pay attention to where it is you are looking for the solution to come from; if you are putting your solution outside of yourself like this will be the thing to solve my problem, if this doesn’t work then you are left with nothing. you still have a lack of control over the issue and you’re still a victim of the problem.

If you say ‘well maybe this doctor will help me solve the problem’ then you are still putting the solution outside of yourself hoping someone else like the next therapist you see is going to be the one to solve the problem. It’s not until you start to take back some of that ownership of what’s going on inside your own head and taking the steps that you need to take in order to get a handle on that you know start figuring those things out that you’ll actually start to get better because if this was the medication then you’re still putting the solution outside of yourself. 

The solution has to come from within you have to start taking control of your own thoughts and the strategies that will help you to manage your emotions better in order to really get the quick fix to solve your problem because otherwise what happens is you get temporary solutions but the problem ends up coming back again. My main suggestion to you at this point is to think about where you are looking for the solution to come from. Are you looking for someone else or something else outside of your physical body to fix it for you? are you looking to do the work inside to follow the tactics and strategies that are taught to you so that you begin to take control of yourself from the inside that my friends is the quickest way to solving your mental health issues.

By Gemma Bailey
www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org