How Do I Find the Right Therapist for Anxiety?

Summary: If you want to find right therapist for anxiety, it’s important to understand what anxiety is, get an accurate diagnosis from a licensed and qualified mental health professional, find out what types of therapy are proven effective for anxiety, and locate a therapist who’s a good match for your treatment goals, practical needs, and your personality.

Key Points:

• Find out as much as you can about anxiety and disorders, using online or personal – e.g. word of mouth – recommendations.
• Arrange a full psychiatric evaluation from a diagnosis from qualified mental health professional to get an accurate diagnosis and referral for care.
• With your list of referral, call prospective therapists to find out what kind of therapy they offer, and whether it meets your needs.
• Recognize that having a good relationship with your therapist – called a positive therapeutic alliance – improves outcomes.

What is Anxiety?

According the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI), all anxiety disorders share one unifying trait:

“Persistent, excessive fear or worry in situations that are not threatening.”

That’s how most people think of anxiety: worry about something past the point of it being productive, or worrying about things that may – to others – seem non-threatening, but feel threatening to the person worrying about them.

The American Psychological Association (APA) offers this more clinical definition of anxiety:

“Anxiety is an emotion characterized by apprehension and somatic symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending danger, catastrophe, or misfortune.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines what we mean when we say anxiety disorder:

“Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or school performance).”

The following physical and emotional signs and symptoms are common for people with anxiety:

• Fear of common daily situations
• Persistent feelings of restlessness
• Chronic irritability
• Expecting the worst outcome for future events
• Tension/excitability
• Hyperventilation/increased heart rate
• Common ailments like nausea or headaches with no clear cause, which don’t respond to common remedies
• Persistent tiredness
• Excess sweating
• Twitching/tremors

It’s important to remember that some anxiety is normal, and even helpful. The APA clarifies the difference between typical, helpful anxiety and anxiety that may meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis:

Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. Mild levels of anxiety can be beneficial in some situations. It can alert us to dangers and help us prepare and pay attention. Anxiety disorders differ from normal feelings of nervousness or anxiousness and involve excessive fear or anxiety.

In addition, the signs and symptoms of anxiety must be present more days than not for a minimum of six months. Therefore, worrying about a social event for a couple of days leading up to it or stressing out about an upcoming test or work assignment – as long as the worry fades after the event passes and is not immediately replace by another worry – does not the threshold for a clinical diagnosis.

Being in a constant state of worry about virtually everything may mean meet the threshold for a clinical diagnosis, however.

That’s probably why you wonder “How Do I Find the Right Therapist for Anxiety”: you may not be on edge and worrying all day every day, but you may know that your level of worry is atypical and causes problems with overall happiness and wellbeing.

It’s also critical to understand that anxiety can be a serious mental illness with significant consequences if left untreated. For some people, anxiety can cause serious disruption across all phases of life, includg family, friends, school, and work.

How Many People Have Anxiety?

If those signs and symptoms above lead you have clinical anxiety, and therefore wonder how do I find the right therapist for anxiety, please understand – and take to heart – that you’re not alone. Millions of adults in the U.S. can relate to what you’re going through. Their circumstances and worries don’t match yours exactly, of course.

But like you, most of them want to find the right therapist for anxiety, so they can manage their daily emotional state and improve their overall wellbeing.

The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2024 NSDUH) shows the following prevalence rates for anxiety among adults in the U.S.:

Past Two-Week Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Adults 18+, 2024

• Mild symptoms: 14.3% (37.5 million)
  • Male: 11.9% (15.2 million)
  • Female: 16.5% (22.6 million)
• Moderate symptoms: 4.7% (12.2 million)
  • Male: 4.0% (5.1 million)
  • Female: 5.3% (7.1 million)
• Severe symptoms: 2.7% (7.1 million)
  • Male: 2.2% (2.8 million)
  • Female: 3.2% (4.3 million)

In plain numbers, those statistics tell us that 37.5 million adults in the U.S. reported mild past-two-week anxiety, 12.2 million reported moderate past-two-week anxiety, and 7.1 million people reported severe past-two-week anxiety, with rates of reported anxiety consistently higher among women than rates of reported anxiety among males.

Anxiety: Specific Therapy for Different Diagnoses

If you want to find the right therapist for anxiety, it’s important to understand that there are different types of anxiety and different levels of severity of anxiety. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) indicates there are at least five primary types of anxiety disorders:

1. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The symptoms of GAD resemble typical daily worries, but are far more intense and frequent. Typical worry makes for some difficult days, whereas GAD can create serious disruption in all aspects of daily life.
2. Social anxiety disorder (SAD). The symptoms of SAD appear before or during situations where a person expects to experience judgment, scrutiny, or close evaluation, such as a job interview, and may also appear before or during typical social situations, such as eating in public or attending a social gathering of any type, with people they know or have never met.
3. Panic disorder. The symptoms of panic disorder appear/manifest as panic attacks. While not all people who have panic attacks have or develop panic disorder, those who do experience sudden, intense fear/discomfort. Physical symptoms like racing heart, shortness of breath, trembling, or tingling often accompany panic attacks, which can increase the emotional impact of the psychological worry associated with the attack.
4. Specific phobias. Phobia refers to an intense fear of a specific situation or thing, with the fear disproportionate to the danger presented by the situation or thing. People with phobias often go to extreme lengths to avoid the thing they fear, which can lead to significant disruption. Common phobias include fear of heights, fear of flying, fear of certain animals, and fear of going to the doctor, and others.

Those are the most common types of anxiety for which people receive clinical diagnoses. To clarify, an accurate diagnosis is necessary because some approaches to treatment match some forms of anxiety better than others. In that way, an accurate diagnosis improves long-term outcomes.

How Do I Find the Right Therapist for Anxiety? Take These Five Simple Steps

First – and this doesn’t count as one of the steps – you need to know that only specific types of providers can diagnose a mental health disorder such as anxiety. In addition, only specific types of providers can refer you to specialized care and write a prescription for medication, if needed. Providers who can legally diagnose anxiety and prescribe medication include primary care physicians, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, family nurse practitioners, and in some cases, physician’s assistants.

Note: Clinical psychologists can diagnose mental health disorders, including anxiety disorders, but they cannot prescribe psychiatric medication, with exceptions in some states.

How to Find the Right Therapist for Anxiety

1. Find a qualified professional, arrange a full psychiatric evaluation, and receive an accurate diagnosis – including type of anxiety – and a referral for care if you meet clinical criteria.
2. Research your treatment options, starting here:
   1. • Psychotherapy, i.e. talk therapy. Common options include:
      • Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
      • Exposure therapy (PE)
      • Interpersonal psychotherapy (for panic disorder)
      • Medication:
      • Anxiolytics
      • For some people, medication developed for depression helps patients with anxiety.
      • Complementary modalities:
      • Mindfulness/meditation/yoga
      • Expressive therapies: writing, visual art, music, drama
      • Lifestyle changes:
      • Exercise and healthy food
      • Sleep hygiene and stress management
3.  Make a list of therapists who match your needs, goals, and meet your basic idea of how you want treatment to happen. A great place to start is with recommendations from close friends or family you trust who’ve engaged in therapy for mental health treatment before. If you trust them and they trust their therapist, then that increases the likelihood they’ll be a good match.
4.  Make a list of therapists who have specialized training and extensive experience supporting patients with anxiety. If you know you want a skilled CBT therapist, prioritize them in your search. Or, if you want an experienced PE therapist, prioritize them in your search.
5.  When you narrow your list down, we encourage you to choose a therapist who you can relate to. That means conversation comes naturally, and you don’t have to try hard to establish an easy rapport based on honesty and trust. This is the positive treatment alliance we mention in the introduction to this article.

We can’t emphasize that last point enough. To paraphrase the American Psychological Association

The relationship between patient ad therapist may be more important than the type of therapy provided.

It’s important to take every aspect of your search seriously. Gain as much knowledge as you can from articles like this one and the one we link to above, arrange a full psychiatric evaluation to get the appropriate diagnosis, research the different therapies available to you, and make your choice based on which therapist best aligns with your treatment goals.

But.

Don’t forget how important connection is. The right therapist for anxiety for you is someone you will eventually trust with deeply personal information. The best way to find out if your personality will work well with their therapeutic style is to meet them face-to-face: make appointments, talk to them, and you’ll likely know within a few minutes if you can whether they’re the right therapist for you.

Finding Help: Resource to Help Find the Right Therapist for Anxiety

If you live in the San Diego area, then please give us a call here at Crownview Medical Group. For people in other areas of the U.S., we recommend consulting the following online resources:

• The Anxiety & Depression Association of America (AADA): Find Your Therapist.
• The American Psychological Association (APA): Psychologist Locator
• The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): Therapist Finder
• The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services: FindTreatment.gov

If you have symptoms of anxiety, please start your search professional support as soon as you think you may need it: decades of evidence show that the earlier a person with a mental health disorder gets appropriate, evidence-based treatment for their disorder, the better the outcome. The right treatment delivered by the right therapist – meaning integrated, holistic care tailored to your diagnosis and personal needs and goals – can change your life. We know because we see it happen every day.