How do I know if I’m ready for rehab?

Making a move to get treated for mental illness or drug abuse is a major step. How do you know if you’re ready to go to rehab?

If you’re thinking about this question, you may be pondering treatment for addiction therapy or for issues like anxiety and depression. Experts estimate(1) that major depressive disorder (MDD) affects 16 million Americans; many of them can benefit from experience in an inpatient therapy center. If you’re wondering, ‘is depression a disability?’ The answer is that federal agencies do find certain types of depression to qualify as disabilities.

“The Social Security Administration (SSA) considers depression to be a mental health disorder that may qualify an individual for disability,” write experts at online therapy site Betterhelp. “However, there are many factors that determine whether your specific experience of depression is a disability.”

This resource from Healthline  goes into more detail on the treatment of depression as a disabling condition.

If you’re one of the many Americans who suffer from chronic depression, you may be comparing your life now to how it used to be before the symptoms manifested or back when you were younger and didn’t have your current slate of problems. Many people have these golden times and feel nostalgia for the days when they didn’t have to wrestle with mental illness and its effects. That can exacerbate the feelings that result from a depressive condition.

But regardless of that impact, in fact, comparing your life to some kind of baseline can be helpful in figuring out whether you’re ready to take the step of getting help. Analyzing your life from a calm, less emotional place can be useful in making decisions that can have a long-term effect on your life.

Professionals and experts also often talk about how being open prepares you to take a step forward.

For many people, if they do this too early before they are ready, they just don’t get the therapeutic result. Worse yet, they can see the lack of results and decide that they’ll never benefit from getting help at all. That starts a vicious cycle where refusing outside help can get people more mired down in depression, addiction, or whatever they’re struggling with based on their personal profiles.

So a good sign for rehab is if you feel like you’re ready to listen. If instead of rejecting outside opinions and things like meetings, you’re thinking about how to benefit from these types of feedback, it might be time to go.

In the same vein, good candidates for rehab centers are also ready to start changing their lives. One example of this is repairing your relationships.

It’s easy for us to think about how addicts have destroyed the social bonds between them and family members, or whoever they have been close to in the past.

But depression can cause these types of strains on relationships as well. Is depression a disability? You can experience strained or broken relationships that take time and energy to repair. Treatment can be a helpful first step in addressing the estrangement that has happened through dealing with a condition like depression, where some kinds of family relationships or other relationships can become collateral damage. Since 4.7% of adults over 18 suffer from depression, according to the CDC, that’s a lot of relationships! (2)

Modern clinicians know that mind and body are connected and that an effect on one can have an impact on the other in surprising ways. Medical journals have devoted pages to these sorts of ideas, as well.

Depression can change your life, your vital signs, and your daily routine. It can exacerbate chronic diseases like diabetes and heart issues.

So one incentive to go to rehab is dealing with your physical health and the underlying mental health problems that affect it. You may feel that there is a compelling reason to go to rehab to re-make your routine in a healthier way, for quality of life and longevity, or also based on input from someone like your family doctor.

Yet another category of people who are ready for rehab consider the toll the depression is taking on their work lives.

One of the major notes for outpatient clinicians is whether someone has had “work refusal” in a given period of time. A doctor might ask a patient if they have had an incident of work refusal and write that into their chart.

With that in mind, going to rehab and getting profound therapy can make you more productive when you return to your normal life.

That’s another reason to consider whether now is the right time for therapy for depression.

Again, with depression, as with any kind of mental illness, there is the potential for danger.

Typically speaking, depressive people will often be pretty passive. Instead of presenting volatile behavior, many people struggling with depression will simply lie down and tune life out during their waking hours.

However, there are dangers in depressive behavior, too, although some of them may be less evident than others. These vary from lacking attention while behind the wheel of a vehicle to failing to take care of yourself day to day. Or someone in the grip of depression may be tempted to do something extreme!

So in thinking about whether depression is a disability, you have to consider whether someone can be a danger to themselves or others in the traditional way that applies to inpatient treatment.

Here’s another example of why you might be ready for help and asking yourself: “is depression a disability?”

You or a loved one might be looking at the stories of people who have gone before.

Whether it’s an addict or someone struggling with anxiety and depression, many people emerge from rehab with positive stories to tell. They can draw a line from their inpatient treatment to outcomes that improve their lives greatly.

When you hear the stories, you may feel like it’s time to sign into an inpatient rehab center. Or you may get negative examples of people who never went to rehab and ended up in dire straits. Either of these kinds of input can make a difference and get you ready to go.

At a very basic and fundamental level, the key gauge of whether you are ready for treatment is whether you want help.

People experienced with addiction and mental health issues will know that usually if somebody doesn’t want help, they’re pretty hard to help.

By contrast, when people embrace therapy, they often get good results with a range of inpatient options(3). That’s partly because of the work and effort that goes into examining the science of mental illness and addiction and the impact that these have on our lives.

Contact caring and professional therapists at Transformations to get started on a path to recovery. When you’re ready for help, taking that first step puts you further toward your goals of getting past whatever you’re dealing with and improving your future.