Mental Health 101: Common Challenges and How Therapy Can Help
- Dr. Maura Ferguson
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
Understanding the landscape of mental health — and why an integrated therapeutic approach offers more than symptom relief.
Everyday Mental Health Challenges
Anxiety & Panic: Racing thoughts, restlessness, insomnia, or a constant sense that something bad is about to happen — anxiety can be loud or quietly exhausting. Panic attacks may come out of nowhere, but often signal deeper inner tension trying to find expression.
Depression & Emotional Numbness: Depression doesn’t always look like sadness. It may show up as irritability, low motivation, fatigue, or a disconnection from pleasure or meaning. People often carry these feelings silently, unsure of how to make sense of them — or feeling they "shouldn’t" be feeling this way.
Trauma & Post-Traumatic Stress: Whether from a single event or repeated experiences over time, trauma affects both mind and body. Symptoms can include hypervigilance, emotional shutdown, flashbacks, or chronic shame. Trauma also disrupts a person’s ability to feel safe with others — or even with themselves.
Personality Patterns & Interpersonal Difficulties: Some struggles are not just about mood, but about enduring patterns in how a person relates to themselves and others. These may include intense fear of abandonment, chronic conflict in relationships, emotional dysregulation, or a persistent sense of emptiness. These challenges are frequently misunderstood — but they are treatable. Therapy can help uncover the early relational injuries that shaped these patterns and support healthier, more stable ways of connecting.
Attachment & Relationship Challenges: Relationship patterns often repeat themselves — difficulty trusting, avoiding closeness, or needing constant reassurance. These aren’t random; they reflect early attachment dynamics that can be explored and worked through in therapy. Working on relationships doesn’t just mean working on communication — it means understanding the emotional templates we bring into every interaction.
Identity & Life Transitions: At key moments in life, questions of identity and meaning come to the surface. These can arise during career shifts, parenthood, loss, migration, changes in gender or sexual identity, or even when things are going “well” on the outside. Therapy offers a space to explore these transitions with depth and clarity.
How Therapy Helps — And Why Depth Matters
Therapy today spans many approaches. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), DBT, EMDR, and other “three-letter” methods offer practical, skills-based interventions. These approaches can be incredibly helpful in building coping tools and reducing immediate distress.
But for many people, symptoms are just the tip of the iceberg.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy looks beneath the surface — helping people understand the unconscious emotional patterns, formative relational experiences, and internal conflicts that shape their current struggles. It’s less about “fixing” and more about understanding, so that change can come from the inside out.
Not Either-Or: Integrating Practical Tools with Deeper Work
Integrated psychoanalytic therapy doesn't reject structured techniques — it incorporates them thoughtfully. CBT tools, DBT skills, and even EMDR protocols can be used within a psychodynamic framework when appropriate.
The reverse, however, is not typically true: structured short-term therapies aren’t designed to hold the kind of open-ended exploration and relational depth that psychoanalytic therapy provides.
In other words: Depth-oriented psychotherapy can contain and integrate skills-based approaches — but not the other way around.
For people looking to understand not just what is happening, but why, an integrated psychoanalytic approach offers both practical support and meaningful insight.
Mental Health Support Timing
Therapy isn’t just for crises. It’s for people who want to feel more whole, more connected, and more in charge of their inner life. Whether you’re managing acute symptoms, untangling relationship struggles, or trying to understand yourself in a deeper way, therapy can help.
Ready to Take the First Step?
If something in this post resonates with you — whether it's anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, or long-standing patterns you’re ready to move beyond — we’re here to help. Our team of psychologists and psychotherapists offers thoughtful, evidence-informed care grounded in depth-oriented and integrative approaches.
We invite you to reach out for an intake consultation to explore what kind of therapy might be the right fit for you.
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