With mental health conditions becoming increasingly destigmatized, more patients are seeking help for anxiety and mood disorders, according to professionals.
Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Anxiety, mood disorders and a changing culture around talking about mental health are bringing more people into therapy.
Demand for mental health services has been on the rise for years, with 60 million Americans receiving treatment or counseling in 2024, according to Statistsa. A 2025 study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found the percentage of Americans using only psychotherapy — aka “talk therapy” — increased from 11.5% in 2018 to 15.4% in 2021. The same study found national psychotherapy expenditures increased by $20.2 billion in the same timeframe.
Article continues below this ad
Emily Legner, director of behavioral health for Memorial Health, said the hospital network had been following the rest of the behavioral health industry as far as visits go. The COVID-19 pandemic brought many people to therapy, she said, and the numbers have continued to climb since.
The top two reasons most people have sought behavioral health treatment in recent years were anxiety and mood disorders, such as depression, Legner said. While new patients have a “fair split” between men and women, they tend to be young adults in the 18-to-35 age range, she said.
Part of the reason for that is it’s more acceptable to be open about mental health issues than it has been in the past, Legner said. For older adults, mental health was not something that was discussed at all; these days, there is more open support for mental health struggles and public figures have been publicly discussing their own battles with mental health, making it “more acceptable to not be OK,” she said.
Younger patients have been socialized to see “going to see a therapist is just like going to a check-up at your physician,” Legner said. “It’s an OK thing to do and something that a healthy person does.”
Article continues below this ad
Stigmas surrounding mental health still exist, however.
They are “the same stigmas that have always been around,” Legner said, with many people worried about what being diagnosed with a mental illness might mean for them or how it might change how they are perceived.
“Some people are ashamed or embarrassed and think that they should just be able to figure things out on their own when getting help with this is something that … a healthy person does,” she said.
Therapy is meant to be a collaborative endeavor, Legner said. In the beginning, a given client will engage in “a lot of talking” with their therapist to understand what they’re dealing with, she said. Subsequent sessions will be tailored to fit that client’s particular needs and what they want to work on, she said.
Article continues below this ad
“The goal is not to keep someone in therapy forever,” Legner said. “That is not what anybody wants or needs. The goal is to get their needs met (and) get them the skills that they’re going to need to be successful without you.”
For anyone on the fence about going to therapy, Legner noted that they do not have to talk about anything they don’t want to talk about or even come to another session if they don’t feel it’s working.
Still, she encourages people to give it a fair shake.
Article continues below this ad
“I always just encourage people to give it a chance,” she said. “Generally, when people do that, they find the value, they do return and they do see improvement.”