The Basics: Therapy vs Medication
Studies show that both therapy and medication can be effective, but the best option really depends on your specific mental health condition, symptom severity, and other factors. Here’s a quick rundown of how both treatments work:
Therapy, also called psychotherapy or talk therapy, is where you team up with a trained, licensed mental health professional to identify and examine thought and behavior patterns that contribute to your mental health concerns. There are many types of therapy, and the most effective one for you depends on your condition, symptoms, recovery goals, and personal preference. Many practitioners offer in-person therapy, but online therapy sessions may also be available depending on the provider.
Medication is often used alongside therapy to treat issues like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and many other mental health disorders. Most common mental health meds work by changing the levels of neurotransmitters that influence mood and thought processes. For example, antidepressants may adjust levels of dopamine or serotonin, which are involved in feelings of pleasure and positive mood. Regularly scheduled appointments with your healthcare provider are usually required for monitoring the effectiveness and side effects of the medication.
Therapy As a First-Line Mental Health Treatment
When facing mental health challenges, therapy offers distinct advantages that medication alone cannot provide. Unlike medications that primarily manage symptoms, therapy addresses the underlying causes of distress by helping individuals understand underlying patterns, develop lasting coping mechanisms, and build resilience for future challenges. The therapeutic relationship creates a space for personal growth and self-discovery where clients gain insights and practical skills that remain long after treatment ends.
Therapy avoids the potential side effects and dependency concerns associated with some medications, instead empowering individuals with sustainable tools for managing their mental health independently. Through approaches like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Schema Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, people become equipped with strategies to recognize and change unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors at their source. While medication may provide rapid relief for some conditions initially, therapy’s benefits often prove more durable over time, leading to meaningful, long-term transformation rather than temporary symptom suppression.
To learn more about how therapy can be an effective mental health treatment for your particular symptoms, please contact the licensed mental health professionals at Balanced Mind of New York for a free, 15-minute consultation.
Important Medication Notice
If you are currently taking psychiatric medications, it is crucial that you do not stop taking them or reduce your doses without first consulting with your prescribing physician or psychiatrist. This includes mood stabilizing medications (sometimes called “mood stabilizers”), antidepressant medications (including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants), antipsychotic medications, anti-anxiety medications, and stimulant medications.
Abruptly discontinuing psychiatric medications can lead to withdrawal symptoms, rebound effects, or the return of symptoms—sometimes more severely than before treatment began. Only your health care provider can safely guide you through medication adjustments, creating an appropriate tapering schedule if needed, while monitoring your well-being throughout the process. Even if you’re experiencing benefits from therapy or are interested in transitioning to non-medication approaches, maintaining open communication with your medical team ensures your safety and supports your overall mental well-being.
Benefits of Therapy Over Medication
Evidence-based therapies such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and Exposure-based treatments provide structured pathways to process difficult experiences, restructure problematic thought patterns, and develop lasting coping skills. These therapeutic modalities equip individuals with techniques to regulate their nervous systems, challenge distorted beliefs formed during traumatic experiences, and gradually reclaim control over their emotional responses. Unlike medication that may require indefinite use, these therapies aim for sustainable recovery by helping people understand and transform their relationship with anxiety and trauma, often leading to meaningful improvement that continues well beyond the course of treatment.
Some of the research-based therapeutic techniques that are used for treating mental health conditions include the following:
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR offers trauma survivors what medication cannot: a way to process and integrate traumatic memories without simply numbing their emotional impact. Through bilateral stimulation paired with targeted memory processing, EMDR helps the brain reprocess traumatic experiences, allowing patients to form new neural connections that reduce distress permanently rather than temporarily suppressing symptoms. Unlike medication that often requires ongoing use to maintain benefits, EMDR often achieves lasting trauma resolution in a relatively short timeframe with effects that persist after treatment concludes.
Schema Therapy
Schema therapy addresses deep-rooted emotional patterns and core beliefs that medications simply cannot reach. By identifying early maladaptive schemas formed in childhood, this approach helps clients understand and transform their fundamental ways of viewing themselves and the world. The reparenting aspects of schema therapy provide corrective emotional experiences that heal attachment wounds at their source, offering genuine emotional resolution rather than symptom management.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT empowers patients with practical skills to recognize and challenge distorted thinking patterns, creating sustainable improvement that continues working long after sessions end. Unlike medication that may require indefinite use, CBT’s structured approach teaches individuals to become their own therapists, with research showing its effects often surpass medications for conditions like depression and anxiety in terms of preventing relapse. The concrete strategies learned in CBT become integrated into daily life, addressing the actual thought processes underlying mental health conditions rather than just biochemical factors.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Therapy
Exposure therapy directly confronts avoidance behaviors that maintain conditions like OCD and phobias, an essential process that medication alone cannot facilitate. By gradually facing feared situations without engaging in compulsions or avoidance, patients experience firsthand that their anxiety naturally subsides, rewiring their cognitive threat-response system in ways medication cannot. The behavioral change achieved through exposure therapy addresses the functional impairment caused by anxiety disorders, helping patients reclaim activities and experiences that medication might make more tolerable but cannot help them engage with directly.
How Can Therapy Benefit Mental Health Conditions?
Therapy offers a multifaceted approach to addressing mental health conditions by providing individuals with both understanding and practical tools for treating symptoms and improving overall mental well-being. Unlike approaches that focus solely on reducing symptoms in the short-term, therapy creates a supportive environment where people can explore the underlying causes of their distress while developing personalized strategies for lasting change.
Through evidence-based techniques tailored to specific mental health conditions, therapy helps individuals recognize problematic patterns in their thoughts, behaviors, and relationships, then work systematically to transform them. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a powerful agent of change, offering validation, perspective, and accountability throughout the healing process. Whether used alone or in combination with medication (sometimes referred to as “combination therapy”), therapy empowers individuals with skills that extend beyond the treatment period. This equips them to better navigate future challenges while building resilience and self-awareness that contribute to long-term mental health stability and more effective functional outcomes.
Mental health therapy may be effective in treating the following common mental health conditions:
Anxiety Disorders
Therapy for anxiety disorders helps individuals identify triggering thoughts and situations while developing practical coping strategies to manage physiological symptoms and challenge catastrophic thinking patterns. Approaches like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy teach patients to recognize anxiety’s physical manifestations and implement techniques such as mindfulness, graded exposure, and cognitive restructuring to reduce their intensity. Through consistent therapeutic work, people with anxiety disorders can build sustainable skills for managing worry and fear, ultimately reclaiming activities and experiences that anxiety once limited.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Therapy for PTSD helps individuals process traumatic memories in a safe environment while developing skills to manage intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and emotional numbing that interfere with daily functioning. Trauma-focused approaches enable survivors to make sense of their experiences and reduce the power these memories hold over their present lives. EMDR therapy specifically facilitates trauma processing through bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements or tapping) while the person recalls traumatic memories, helping the brain process these experiences in a way that reduces their emotional charge and integrates them into a coherent life narrative, often with remarkable efficiency compared to talk therapy alone.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
For OCD, specialized therapies like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) directly address the condition’s core mechanisms by gradually exposing individuals to anxiety-provoking situations while preventing the compulsive behaviors that temporarily relieve distress. Through this structured practice, patients learn that anxiety naturally subsides without performing rituals, weakening the obsession-compulsion cycle at its foundation. Therapy also helps individuals recognize intrusive thoughts as just thoughts—not threats requiring action—while building tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort.
Major Depressive Disorder
Major depressive disorder is sometimes referred to as “Major Depression” or simply “Depression.” Therapy for depression targets the negative thought patterns, behavioral avoidance, and interpersonal difficulties that maintain depressive cycles, helping individuals rebuild motivation and meaning. Through approaches like behavioral activation, patients gradually re-engage with rewarding activities and establish healthier routines that counteract depression’s downward spiral. Cognitive techniques help challenge the pessimistic thinking and self-criticism that fuel depression, while interpersonal therapy addresses relationship patterns that may contribute to or result from depressive episodes.
Phobias
Therapy for phobias, particularly exposure therapy, systematically helps individuals confront feared objects or situations in a controlled, graduated manner that builds confidence while reducing avoidance behaviors. Through repeated exposure, the brain undergoes a process called habituation, where the phobic stimulus gradually loses its power to trigger intense fear responses. Cognitive techniques complement this approach by helping individuals challenge catastrophic thoughts about the feared object or situation while developing more realistic assessments of risk, ultimately allowing them to engage in previously avoided activities with decreasing levels of distress.
Can I Still Benefit From Therapy Even If I Require Psychiatric Medication to Manage My Symptoms?
While medications often play an essential role in managing mental health issues like psychotic and bipolar disorders, therapy provides valuable benefits that medications alone cannot offer. Even when psychiatric medications remain necessary for treating mental health conditions, therapy equips individuals with crucial skills to recognize early warning signs of episodes, develop personalized coping strategies, and navigate the emotional and social challenges that accompany these conditions. Therapy with a licensed mental health professional creates a supportive space to process the impact of living with a mental health condition, addressing issues like identity, relationships, and quality of life that extend beyond symptom control.
Additionally, therapeutic interventions can improve medication adherence by helping individuals understand their treatment, work through ambivalence about medication, and integrate this aspect of care into a meaningful recovery journey. The combination of medication for biological symptom management and therapy for psychological and social support often creates a more comprehensive approach that addresses the full spectrum of a person’s needs, enhancing overall functioning and wellbeing despite ongoing medication requirements.
How Do I Pay For Therapy?
At Balanced Mind of New York, we offer multiple payment options to fit your needs and budget.
In-Network Insurance Provider: Balanced Mind of New York is proud to be an in-network provider for clients covered by Aetna insurance plans.
Out-of-Network Insurance Provider: For all other insurances, we provide superbills for reimbursement. We will contact your insurance company to confirm your eligibility and benefits, including the reimbursement rate for each session. We will also guide you through the process of sending superbills to your insurance.
If you have an out-of-network plan, any reimbursements will be sent directly to you from your insurance provider. Insurance typically reimburses 50-80% of the fee, but note that each policy is different.
Self-Payment Options: If no insurance coverage is available, clients may choose to pay for services out of their own pocket. If you need to pay out of pocket, we offer a sliding scale as part of our commitment to providing affordable care.
We accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and HSA/FSA cards.
To learn more, please contact Balanced Mind of New York.
