Counselng - how much does it cost??

Question

Does insurance pay for it? If you have gotten it did it help? What was your opinion of it?

Answer 1

Ok, if you have insurace, you will be lucky to get them to cover very much of it, because a lot of insurance companies consider couseling a joke (trust me I used to work for one). If you don't have insurance there are several places you can try. First, call your local Department of Health and Human Resources and see what information they can give you about local counselors. If that doesn't help you, try calling your local Health Department. Third, try your local United Way. In my area, our United Way (which I am sure in all areas this is offered because the United Way is a worldwide thing) has a program called Family Services. Family Services is a counseling/therapy program with liscensed/certified therapists and couselors available. They charge based upon your income. If it is determined that you need to see a psychiatrist to be given medication, they will also help you find that care by a doctor which will also charge based on your income. Usually I would say go with the United Way first as they are usually the best bet, but I'm not sure what is available in your area.

As for getting counseling, I myself have personally been seeing the same counselor for going on 7 years now. I had a rough life for the first 17 years, and while I am not extremely trusting of anyone (yes, even the counselor), having someone to talk to about the things I am willing to reveal to someone is wonderful. Each time I finish a session I feel as if a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders, because I leave knowing that now someone else knows what I am dealing with, and I am no longer having to keep it all bottled up inside and someone else can help me deal with it now. I have worked through a lot of personal issues this way. While it may not be the same for you, I always tell people that it nevers hurts to give it a try, and it may take you two or three times before you begin to feel comfortable with a counselor...or you may have to go through three or four couselors before you find one you are comfortable with as well. Again, it never hurts to try.

Answer 2

This depends on where you go. There are some places that base your payment on a sliding scale if you don't have insurance. It's based on your income. My counselor charges about $200 for a 45 minute session which my insurance covers. However, you if you do have insurance, they might not cover all of it if they cover any at all. You may have to pay a co-pay for your visits. One insurance coverage I had only covered 40%, but the insurance I have now covers 100%. So it really depends on where you go and what kind of insurance you have. Call your insurance company and ask them what they cover. Depending on whether you have a PPO or an HMO, there might be a limit to what doctors they will cover.

Answer 3

Depends on both the therapist, and any insurance coverage you may have.

If you have insurance, you could be lucky enough to have it all covered.

If you don't, then your best bet will be to find a counselling service that offers a sliding scale fee - where how much you pay is based on your income.

And of course, there is always that other option of getting counselling from some place that doesn't charge... for example, where I live, you can get counselling from government mental health services at no charge.

Answer 4

counseling helps very much.

However, the degree on how much counseling helps depends on you, your capacity to be honest, and the counselor/therapist.

Also, some situations require multiple facets. That is, in addition to individual counseling, you might have to go to group therapy, take medication, and have monitoring consultations with a pyschiatrist.

The costs can vary, depending on insurance and the counselor. I visited a specialist in compulsive behavior who was not covered by my insurance. The cost was $90 per hour. The therapist was very good and very effective.

You shouldn't put a cost on your well being, you should not be afraid, but go in with an open mind.

Answer 5

it has be answered many times by all these people yet princess explained it in a long detail and AA explained it in a simplified short answer and here is the thing look back at your life, since you were a kid, till where you stand right now imagine your were ignorant all that you will lose from that time to this and to the future that is your cost, the cost of your ignorance ( not calling you ignorant, just making an example ) then think however of the gain of ignorance then compare both gains and YOU tell me which is the costly one

Answer 6

my insurance pays for it, but without insurance i would have to pay about $200 per session.

Answer 7

Depends were you live. In the UK it's free on the NHS

Answer 8

Read a couple of the books, listed at the end, to help yourself. Read all this also please. Mediation techniques can greatly help to cure depression, & other unwanted mental/emotional states, and generates within a person a very positive optimistic viewpoint of oneself, and of life. Buddhist Philosophy and Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation, mindfulness and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress. To most people Buddhism is an ancient Asian religion, although a very special one. It has no god, it has no central creed or dogma and its primary goal is the expansion of consciousness, or awareness. But to the 14th Dalai Lama, it's a highly refined tradition, perfected over the course of 2,500 years, of analyzing and investigating the inner world of the mind in order to transform mental states and promote happiness. "Whether you are a believer or not in the faith," the 14th Dalai Lama recently told a conference of Buddhists and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can use its time-honored techniques to voluntarily control your emotional state. Yes, the 14th Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of over 580 million buddhists worldwide. Yes, he is also the head of the Tibetan government in exile. But in the spirit of Buddhism the Dalai Lama has an inquiring mind and wishes to expand human knowledge to improve lives. At its core, Buddhism is a system of inquiry into the nature of what is. He believes that psychology and neuroscience have gone as far as they can go in understanding the mind and brain by measuring external reality. Now that inner reality--the nature of consciousness--is the pressing subject du jour, the sciences need to borrow from the knowledge base that Buddhism has long cultivated. A comprehensive science of the mind requires a science of consciousness. Buddhism offers what MIT geneticist Eric Lander, Ph.D., called a "highly refined technology" of introspective practices that provide systematic access to subjective experience. Yet Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress. Over the past 25 years, starting with his own personal interest, the 14th Dalai Lama has set up discussions with Western scientists in an effort to further knowledge about the emotions. The recent meeting, held at MIT, was actually the eleventh in a series of annual conversations sponsored by the Colorado-based Mind & Life Institute. But it was the first one that was open to other participants. The Buddhist view of how the mind works is somewhat different from the traditional Western view. Western psychology holds to the belief that things like attention and emotion are fixed and immutable. Buddhism sees the components of the mind more as skills that can be trained. This view has increasing support from modern neuroscience, which is daily providing new evidence of the brain's capacity for change and growth! “Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions. Through meditative practices, such as mindfulness of breathing, loving-kindness meditation, and insight meditation, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of a fast growing interest to Western psychiatrists, psychologists, and cognitive behavioral therapists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability. Techniques of awareness permit the cultivation of self-control. They allow people to break the negative emotional chain reaction and head off the hopelessness and despair it leads to. By focusing attention, it is possible to monitor your environment, recognize a negative stimulus and act on it the instant it registers on awareness. While attention as traditional psychologists know it can be an exhausting mental activity, as Buddhists practice it it actually becomes a relaxing and effortless enterprise. One way of meditation is to use breathing techniques in which you focus on the breathing and let any negative stimulus just go by--instead of bringing it into your working memory, where you are likely to sit and ruminate about it and thus amplify its negativity. It's a way of unlearning the self-defeating ways you somehow acquired of responding catastrophically to negative experiences. Evidence increasingly suggests that meditation techniques are highly effective at helping people recover from of depression and especially very useful in preventing recurrences. Medication may be needed during the depths of an acute episode to jump-start brain systems, but at best "antidepressants are a halfway house," says Dr. Alan Wallace PhD. When you have identified your major problem through meditation, whatever the problem is that is bothering you terribly, you should then sit there, relax, and call up this emotion in your meditation. Whether it is anger, jealousy, pride, envy, greed, loneliness, depression, anxiety, summon it here. Look at the essence of this emotion that makes you suffer so much. The mind is the root of all our experiences, for others and for us. If we perceive the world in an unclear way, confusion and suffering will surely arise! It is like someone with defective vision seeing the world as being upside down, or a fearful person finding everything frightening. We may be largely unaware of our ignorance and wrong views, yet present the mind it can be compared to a wild tiger, rampaging through our daily lives. Motivated by desire, hatred and bewilderment this untamed mind blindly pursues what it wants and lashes out at all that stands in its way, with little or no understanding of the way things really are. Mindfulness meditation helps us see things, people, situations, clearly – as they really are. The wildness we have to deal with is not simply that of anger and rage; it is much more fundamental than that. The tendency to be driven by ignorance, anger, hatred, and greed enslaves us, allowing confusion and negative emotions to predominate. Thus the mind becomes wild and uncontrollable and our freedom is effectively destroyed. Normally we are so blind that we are unaware of how wild our minds really are. When things go wrong we tend to blame other people and circumstances, rather than look inside ourselves for the causes of the suffering. But if we are ever to find true peace or happiness it is that wildness within which must be faced and dealt with. Only then can we learn to use our energy in a more positive and balanced way, so that we stop causing harm to ourselves and to others. The meditative techniques of Mindfulness of Breathing, Insight Meditation and Loving-kindness Meditation greatly aids us in curing depression, anxieties, anger, rage, hatred, greed, and creates Optimism within.
Excellent Beginner’s Books to read and practice are: (1) “The Beginner’s Guide To Insight Meditation” {This is a most Excellent book to get started with, providing a very Positive, Optimistic View) By: Arinna Weisman & Jean Smith. (2) “Open Heart, Clear Mind” By: Thubten Chodron (Her teacher was the 14th Dalai Lama). (3) “Working With Anger” {& other difficult emotions). By: Thubten Chodron. (4) “The Heart of Forgiveness” {A practical path to healing ourselves) By: Madeline Ko-I Bastis. And also (5) “Transforming The Mind” By: The 14th Dalai Lama.