Do I need a diagnosis for therapy?
Please note: our blog posts are solely informational and are not meant to replace individualized therapeutic advice or healthcare.
You are the expert on your own experience. PERIOD.
While some people find it really validating and grounding to get a formal diagnosis that’s certainly not necessary for therapy.
With a formal mental health diagnosis, we have heard clients say that ‘so many of their struggles make sense’ that this information was a ‘missing piece’ in the puzzle of their lives.
Diagnoses can also be necessary when trying to access certain funding or specialized services.
But, diagnoses come with some drawbacks too. Firstly, they can be difficult to obtain. In Ontario, when it comes to getting appointments with specialized doctors like psychiatrists or psychologists the waitlists are lengthy or the costs are quite high. Because of these factors, you likely won’t have an extensive relationship with this provider and the diagnosis could be fairly rushed. There’s something unsettling about diagnosing someone with a personality disorder 30 minutes into an hour-long appointment.
These professionals will either administer formal assessments that have been researched and proven to reliably determine a diagnosis or they might take a less formal approach with observations and conversation. They are assessing to see if you qualify under certain categories of mental disorders as laid out by the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders).
Important Note: there have been many iterations of the DSM throughout its history.
New disorders pop up, criteria for others change and some disorders get deleted from one version to the next. Why? There could be many arguments about this but at the centre of our beliefs about mental health and mental illness is our socialization. Hysteria and penis envy used to exist in the manual (which was written by men) but those have long been deleted. Even now there exist controversial disorders that some professionals might personally agree or disagree with (homosexuality, gender dysphoria, adult ADHD as examples).
This is all to say, any formal diagnosis should be taken with a grain of salt. Your particular doctor might not believe adult ADHD is a thing, while another doctor is an ADHD activist and helps clients with diagnosis, a care plan and community resources. Inevitably, as thinking in society shifts then so too might diagnoses.
For therapy, it rarely matters what your formal diagnosis is or if you have one at all.
Therapists care about your perception of yourself and the world.
Do you feel like your mood is unstable?
Do your thoughts spiral and keep you awake?
Do certain patterns keep repeating themselves in your relationships?
If these issues are important for you to address, then they are important enough to speak with a therapist about. During therapy if your therapist feels like a formal diagnosis would benefit you in some way, like with funding or accessing specialized services, then they might recommend taking that step.
Even if you don’t know exactly what the issue is, just a vague feeling of ‘this doesn’t feel right’. That’s ok, too. Through the therapeutic uncovering process you will gain insight into that feeling, see what’s behind it and hopefully help it shift.
Long story short, you don’t need a diagnosis for therapy but you might choose to get one when it feels right for you.
If you’re thinking about therapy, reach out to us and we’ll happily walk you through the process. Or book a FREE consultation so we can get to know you more and find the right therapist on our team for you.
Read more about depression therapy or affordable therapy by click on their links.