Mental health remains a pressing public health challenge, but also a priority for many people who continue to seek treatment.
Recent data from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) shows that more than one in five adults — equivalent to 59.3 million people — live with a mental illness. Among those people, 50.6%, more than half, received some form of mental health treatment, both inpatient and outpatient. The NIMH also notes that of the more than 15.4 million adults with a serious mental illness, 66.7% pursued treatment.
Promising numbers that illustrate a proactivity by people in search of better mental health, it’s just one reason to advocate for a holistic approach to mental health.
As a complement to traditional psychotherapy, holistic therapy for mental health encompasses integrative care that addresses your whole self — with growing evidence pointing to the ways it can benefit you emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
What Is Holistic Mental Health Treatment?
Holistic, in a word, means “whole,” and at its core, holistic mental health treatment aligns with the philosophy that mental health is more than just a series of symptoms, and it affects more than just the mind but your entire self. By treating your closely interconnected system of mind, body, and spirit, holistic therapy can facilitate your healing and recovery.
A holistic approach to mental health aims to look at all aspects of your life, from the physical to the emotional, the spiritual to the social, through a range of alternative techniques, many of which have been used for centuries and even millennia.
Yoga, meditation, breathing practices, expressive arts, and guided imagery are just a few holistic examples empowering you to thrive in every way. Since holistic therapy considers all aspects of your well-being, it remains a powerful tool for personal growth and discovery with a goal to help you heal in ways that feel authentic and in alignment.
Holistic therapy for mental health remains valuable because it both contrasts with and complements traditional, evidence-based treatment. It doesn’t mean foregoing talk therapy, a necessary component to uncovering the root of one’s mental health issues. Holistic mental health treatment centers that rely on integrative care ensure that they offer both behavioral and holistic therapy for mental health in tandem.
A Whole-Person Approach to Healing
The mind-body-spirit connection within all of us is multifaceted yet also seamless. Think about times when you’ve felt happy and balanced when everything just seems to fall into harmony. Your mind, body, and spirit are working together to make this happen, but when mental health suffers, it can diminish each of these aspects and take a toll on your well-being.
This is the foundation for holistic therapy for mental health. It recognizes that mental health is linked to that mind-body-spirit complexity but that serious conditions like depression, anxiety, trauma, or personality disorders can weaken this connection.
A holistic treatment center seeks to rectify this and supports healing by bringing attention to your internal experience, your physical presence, your sense of connection to yourself and the world around you all at the same time.
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Traditional Therapies Used in Mental Health Treatment
A mental health treatment center like Footprint to Recovery is integrative, which means we integrate and combine a holistic approach to mental health with traditional therapies, which remain foundational components to helping people overcome their challenges.
Evidence-Based Psychotherapy
Therapy that is evidence-based means that it’s been proven to treat diverse types of mental health issues through decades of research and practice. It doesn’t matter if you struggle with mild social anxiety or crippling depression — talk therapy between a trusted counselor works and can give you a clearer understanding of why you feel the way you do, how it’s affecting your life and what you can do to move forward.
One popular type of treatment is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short. It’s built with the understanding that your cognition and behavior inform each other — in other words, that negative thoughts can adversely shape the way you feel and act. CBT works to help you reframe that mental narrative into a positive, self-affirming mindset that has a positive influence on your emotions and behavior.
Other therapies are tailored for specific issues. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT, combines the hallmark traits of CBT with mindfulness strategies to improve emotional regulation, a problem faced by many people with borderline personality disorder. Another example is EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a type of therapy program helping people heal from the distress caused by life-changing traumatic experiences.
What Can Holistic Mental Health Treatment Centers Treat?
A holistic approach to mental health means addressing your whole self through a range of therapies, but also the ability to treat the same number of disorders and accompanying symptoms that conventional therapy can help.
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety can show up as racing thoughts, tightness in your chest, shallow breathing, or a constant feeling that something isn’t right — even if you can’t explain why. More than 19% of adults experienced any anxiety order in the past year, from generalized anxiety disorder to social anxiety or panic disorders. Holistic therapy for mental health might incorporate mindfulness, teaching you to stay present rather than becoming anxious about the future, or yoga to help release physical tension.
Depressive Disorders
Depression can affect anyone and remains one of the most common, prevalent mental health issues. More than 21 million adults in the U.S. experience depression each year, according to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. Left untreated, the persistent sadness, hopelessness, and loss of pleasure in the things you once enjoyed, symptomatic to depression, can worsen and literally take you away from your life. Alongside psychotherapy, a holistic recovery center aims to heal depression, for example, through teaching mindfulness practices that help break the cycle of rumination, plus creative outlets to express your feelings when you’ve left them bottled up.
Trauma-related Disorders
Trauma, particularly PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) can happen after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event, like an accident, act of violence, natural disaster, or for veterans, participation in combat. Within the last few years, 13 million Americans have suffered from PTSD, and about six in 100 people will have PTSD at some point in their lives. Trauma disorders, which can also take shape as Reactive Attachment Disorder and Acute Stress Disorder, among others, can be treated holistically through meditation to help regulate the nervous system and massage therapy to help address how trauma is stored physically.
Personality Disorders
Marked by patterns of unstable self-image, mood swings, and impulsive behaviors, conditions like bipolar and borderline personality disorder leave sufferers struggling to regulate their emotions and maintain healthy relationships. The recent prevalence of any personality disorder, says the NIMH, was 9.1% in adults. Those with any personality disorder can benefit from a holistic approach to mental health, particularly therapies like mindfulness and meditation; combined with DBT, it can help you to increase the self-awareness to use in situations when impulses and emotions may have once seemed uncontrollable.
Footprints to Recovery Mental Health provides outpatient treatment programs in New Jersey.
What Therapies Are Used at a Mental Health Treatment Center?
Holistic mental health treatment centers such as the Footprints to Recovery New Jersey campus are unique by incorporating more than a dozen therapies to help heal your spirit along with your body and mind:
Meditation and Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the skill of being mindful of your thoughts and emotions. It’s a skill because our minds can race all day long, a million thoughts and realizations colliding all at once in most waking moments. Meditation helps you to be still, be calm, and concentrate on those thoughts. As you inhale, hold those thoughts for a moment and let them go, without judgment, with each exhale. Clearing your mind enables you to live in the present and appreciate each moment for what it is. It’s ideal to reduce stress, cultivate deeper self-understanding, and more importantly, remind you to hold your thoughts without judgment.
Expressive Arts Therapy
Art, music, and writing — we can all appreciate them as spectators, but give painting, playing an instrument, or journaling a try and see how they’re each powerful ways to express feelings that may be difficult to articulate, especially if you’re new to talk therapy. It’s here that expressive art therapy becomes a creative outlet for processing experiences and emotions — where anything you put on canvas, paper, or recording has no right or wrong answer. Uncovering a new talent and gaining a better understanding of your innermost motivations is like a dual pathway to healing that embraces both creativity and cognitive processing.
Yoga
A practice harkening back to ancient Indian philosophy, yoga is both a physical exercise and a meditative practice to connect your body and mind — a bridge between the physical and the mental. Yoga imparts numerous health benefits to mental health, from reducing stress to improving your mood and enhancing your sense of well-being. Incorporating it into your holistic routine alongside meditation, think of yoga as a form of moving mindfulness; as you hold each pose, you harness some of the tensions, anxieties, and other symptoms you may be dealing with, moving on as you move to the next asana, or pose.
Massage Therapy
Persistent worry from anxiety. Depression weighs down like a boulder on one’s shoulders. Frenetic energy from trauma can tax the nervous system. Massage therapy offers gentle yet profound benefits, especially when stress and tension — physical symptoms common to many mental health issues — have taken a toll on your body. Relieving muscular tension can give both your body and mind an opportunity to heal and let go of the tensions they’ve been holding for too long.
Acupuncture
Rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, acupuncture is increasingly recognized as an effective adjunct to standard mental health treatment. This therapy involves ever so gently stimulating specific points on your body with needle points to restore balance and energy flow. Just as a condition like depression can prevent you from thinking and seeing clearly, it can also block this vital energy flow, known in TCM as qi (pronounced “chi”). An acupuncture session releases chemicals throughout your muscles, spinal cord, and brain, which are meant to promote the body’s natural healing capability.
Life Skills Training
Any disorder, from mental health to substance use, can take you away from practicing the day-to-day skills we often take for granted. Life skills training is considered a holistic approach to mental health because it helps reacquaint you with the tools that were always within your reach but that have been blurred by poor mental health. This might include communication, time management, setting boundaries, managing emotions, or building routines — pragmatic, practical skills that help you stay steady in the real world.
The Value of Both Evidence-based and Holistic Treatment
Think of mental health treatment, in its most comprehensive state, as a yin-yang approach — opposing, yet complementary, sides of the same therapeutic coin. Signing up for an integrated treatment plan, with conventional therapy on one end and a complementary approach on the other, is what makes holistic treatment centers like Footprints to Recovery so effective: evidence-based therapies provide the scientific foundation for treatment while holistic therapy for mental health addresses alternative dimensions of healing.
Combining the two and all they entail unite as one comprehensive treatment plan with multiple pathways, avenues, and conduits to recovery. And they work synergistically — for example, insights you may have gleaned in talk therapy may aid your next meditation session and vice versa.
Finding Professional Help for Mental Health Disorders
Footprints to Recovery is a holistic treatment center that treats all the mental health disorders we’ve explored in this article, plus others. We’re here to meet you where you’re at. Whether you need structured support through conventional therapy or holistic therapy for mental health, like mindfulness or expressive arts that suit your recovery journey best, our treatments are meant to support your unique path. That means when you sign up for mental health or addiction treatment, your plan is tailored specifically to your needs.
Knowing when to ask for help for mental health is a sign of bravery and accountability for yourself. Take charge of your recovery, and let us help. After a consultation, we can verify your insurance and guide you through the steps to admission. Contact us today if you want to regain control of your mental health and well-being.
References:
- https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness
- https://onlinedegrees.nku.edu/programs/healthcare/msn/pmhnp/holistic-approach-to-mental-health/
- https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22838-dialectical-behavior-therapy-dbt
- https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
- https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder
- https://www.dbsalliance.org/education/depression/statistics/
- https://mhanational.org/conditions/depression/
- https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/common/common_adults.asp
- https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/personality-disorders
- https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/yoga-effectiveness-and-safety
- https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/acupuncture
