How to Get a Loved One Help for Behavioral Health Disorders
Your loved one is struggling with mental illness and other behavioral health disorders, and you feel like you’re at a loss on how to help them. They might not even be aware the situation is so dire or that they require professional help at all. When you need to have a serious conversation, you should know how to facilitate successful mental health interventions.
But how can you set the stage for a successful intervention?
The best thing you can do is keep the dialogue open and honest. Time it well and ask questions to show that you’re listening to their fears and concerns. Educate yourself and know what treatment options are available locally. Be prepared to offer tangible support and address their opposition to care.
Icarus Behavioral Health Nevada is here to help you navigate some of these tough conversations and get your loved one into effective treatment. We offer care at every level so that everyone has the perfect level of support moving forward. To learn more about how to have mental health interventions, here are our best tips.
How to Stage a Mental Health Intervention for Your Loved One
One of the hardest things you can do is sit back and watch someone’s mental health conditions start to deteriorate. While you can’t force them into treatment, you can do a lot to express concern and set the stage for them to get the help they need. These tips will help you stage a mental health intervention.
Keep the Dialogue Open but Honest
The first thing you need to know when staging a mental health crisis intervention is to keep the lines of communication as open as you can. This is a time for you to express your concern and give them a solid reason why they should seek help.
It’s easy to be combative, especially if you’re met with resistance. Instead, cooler heads need to prevail and you need to be firm but gentle about their need for mental health services. They might try to bait you into an argument to deflect your concern but don’t give in. Remain firm and lean away from blaming them for the situation at hand.
Explain to them exactly why you have concerns about their mental health and what you’ve noticed in them over the past few weeks or months. Be logical and present it as a question rather than a closed case. It should be a dialogue, not a monologue.
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Think About Timing Your Conversation
There are good times and bad times to approach a conversation about protecting mental health with a friend or family member. You might try to lay the foundation for your conversation over days or weeks, arming yourself with data and treatment options. But it won’t make any difference if you stage a mental health intervention at the wrong time.
The best time to have the conversation is when things are calm and your loved one can be open and receptive to hearing your concerns. That means that it shouldn’t come in the heat of the moment of an argument or when they’re stressed about something at work. You may even want to avoid the hard talk when a bad mood presents itself.
By timing your interventions well, you can ensure that your loved one is open and receptive to what you have to say to the greatest extent possible.
Ask Questions about Their Mental Health Conditions
What you notice on the surface may not necessarily align with what’s going on under the radar. Mental disorders are tricky to treat because no one truly knows the extent of the issue except for the person who is struggling. Only they know all of the ins and outs of their feelings and experiences.
A good mental health professional knows that they need to ask questions to get to the bottom of any mental illness. The same is true when staging mental health interventions. You can ask questions to figure out exactly what’s ailing your loved one and help them make the important decision to seek treatment.
When they explain how they’re feeling, make sure they feel seen and heard. Repeat what they said back to them in the form of a question. This is a great active listening technique that can open the door to improved communication skills.
Educate Yourself on Their Mental Health Condition
Understanding what it’s like to live inside their head is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to convincing someone to seek help for mental health issues. They want to feel heard and understood by the person they’re talking to. A little bit of education can go a long way toward helping them realize that they don’t have to feel this way.
Not to mention, education can also help you understand the different routes to treatment to improve mental health.
Knowing what the treatment options are for mental health care allows you to talk about the safe and available treatment options that they might pursue. You can turn to the free research at the National Library of Medicine or the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Both are great ways to start researching and understanding mental health problems.
Know the Treatment Options for Mental Health Promotion
To stage a successful mental health intervention, you need to be prepared to offer them some concrete next steps to get the help they need. While you can’t contact mental health professionals for them, you can do the leg work to find out what facilities and services are available in your area.
Present them with options for talk therapy, support groups, inpatient help, or whatever you feel would be the best option given their symptoms and circumstances. Ask them what level of care they believe would be most helpful for them, giving them a voice in the matter.
The best thing you can do is present them with a list of options for mental health care, preferably those that accept their insurance and are convenient to their home and work. Explain the advantages of each treatment option and allow them the freedom to select what works best for them.
Offering a Support System
Of course, sometimes it’s the practical things that keep people from seeking help for a mental illness. They might not have anyone to watch their pets, take their children to school, or manage the household. Maybe they don’t have a way to get back and forth to their therapy sessions.
All of these are obstacles that can easily be overcome with support from you. The adage that it takes a village certainly applies to receiving top-notch mental health care. Especially if they could benefit from inpatient treatment at the start, it might require a sacrifice on your part to facilitate care.
Don’t just assume what they may need help with. Ask questions to get to the bottom of their concerns and come up with practical ways you can offer assistance so that there are no more barriers to care.
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Addressing Opposition and Refusal Proactively
If they’re resistant to the idea of mental health services, this is also a good time to ask why. Explore their concerns and allay their fear so that they can feel good about the prospect of enrolling in help. Understanding why they might be resistant is crucial in striking down those concerns in favor of a robust treatment regimen.
When they cite financial concerns, tell them that many providers take insurance and guide them to verify their benefits through facilities like Icarus Behavioral Health. Our enrollment team can verify insurance benefits in a quick and confidential phone call. This eliminates one more barrier to getting your loved ones into treatment.
Be Committed to Long-Term Care
Getting help for mental health conditions isn’t usually a one-and-done situation. While your intervention may result in them seeking care from a team of medical professionals, most mental health conditions like bipolar disorder and other mood disorders, anxiety, thought disorders, and more will require long-term care.
It might be easy to offer support right now, convincing them to enroll in an inpatient setting for the next month or two. However, they will eventually return home and may potentially need more support than ever to maintain the gains they had in therapy. To this end, you need to remain committed to offering support.
Check in with them to see how things are going, see what you can do to help them manage their mental disorders, and continue to provide them with the same level of support until they feel more comfortable resuming their responsibilities.
Provide Multiple Treatment Levels and Options
In the beginning, some people with mental health issues might benefit from the intense psychological interventions of an inpatient facility. With our facilties at Icarus Behavioral Health in Las Vegas, they can live in the comfort and safety of our facility while gaining access to a team of professionals when they need someone to talk to at any time of the day or night.
As they start to get better, we can help them transition to partial hospitalization or intensive outpatient. Both allow them to spend their days in our facility receiving professional treatment while returning to their home, family, and bed at the end of the day.
Knowing that the facility they select allows them to scale back their care can provide a great degree of reassurance for concerned family members and friends. They might be a bit more open to an outpatient program which can help you to have a successful intervention.
Be Persistent in the Face of Resistance
Last but not least, it’s important to acknowledge that not all mental health interventions are going to be successful. Your loved one may not be in a position to acknowledge their mental health conditions yet, and that’s okay. It may even be expected if they’re struggling right now and have never sought help for these issues.
The first time they learn that their condition impacts the people around them might be during your early conversations around the intervention. It can take time for them to warm up to the idea that they don’t necessarily have to live this way.
Unfortunately, it can be tempting to shelve the conversation indefinitely if it isn’t well received by your loved one. Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your loved one might need to have many talks with you about their condition and the available treatment centers in their area before they’re ready to commit to care.
Know the Signs of a Mental Health Crisis
Sometimes, a mental health intervention may not be the right move for your loved one. There are times when you may have to take more drastic action, eliminating their need for approval. They might not be able to commit to treatment or even be able to have a coherent conversation with you about what they need.
What necessitates mental health crisis interventions and what signs should you be on the lookout for?
The first sign that you may need to intervene in a crisis is if your loved one is a danger to themselves or someone else. If they express suicidal ideation, a desire to harm themselves or another person, or they lose the ability to reason with you, then it’s time to seek treatment immediately.
When any of these signs present themselves, it’s time to take things beyond an intervention. It may be time to take them to a hospital or arrange for inpatient care where they can get around-the-clock help for an issue that presents itself. The National Institute on Mental Health gives some options for getting immediate help.
Involuntary Commitment Instead of a Mental Health Intervention
If your loved one is a danger to themselves or others but refuses treatment, the best route to helping them receive care is to have them involuntarily committed to a hospital with a psychiatric unit. You can get them to the hospital for an assessment by a team of social workers and clinicians to determine the likelihood that they might cause harm.
The benefit of involuntary commitment is two-fold. First, it takes the pressure off of you to convince them to seek help. The decision is made for them by professionals. They might be upset with you for a little while for pushing them into the hospital, but they will hopefully come around to seeing the danger they were in.
Second, it gets them help immediately. As soon as a bed opens up in an appropriate facility, they can get the help they need. It’s usually mandated that they enroll in an inpatient program where they will reside for a short time, giving relief from worrying about their safety or the safety of others.
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Consult Icarus Before Mental Health Interventions for Support
Before you stage a mental health intervention, you should know what treatment options are available in your local area. Icarus Nevada is proud to offer help at every stage of the process ranging from inpatient to an intensive outpatient program. As your loved one heals, they can scale back their therapy sessions and get back to living their life.
Gather information on our program and verify insurance benefits with a quick and confidential call to our friendly enrollment team. We’re here to answer your questions and give the details needed to lovingly confront someone about their mental illnesses.
Don’t wait another day to start gathering help for a loved one who might need assistance to conquer a mental health condition. Reach out to us now to learn more about our programs!