June 2025 | A Promising Increase in Psychotherapy
May 29, 2025
In the United States, psychotherapy attendance has risen by a significant percentage in recent years. A recent study in the American Journal of Psychiatry (May 2025) found that "The number of American adults who receive psychotherapy went up from about 6.5% in 2018, up to 8.5% in 2021," the principal authors told NPR in May. "So that's increased from about 16.5 million to nearly 22 million people." The study noted a decline in individuals receiving only medication as treatment for mental health concerns. More people are utilizing psychotherapy, or a combination of medication and psychotherapy. But, as the NPR article points out, access to psychotherapy services remains difficult for many individuals.
It’s important to have both access and options. Everyone is different and individual treatment needs can vary: psychotherapy or medication alone or various combinations of both. The opportunity to see improvement through psychotherapy alone when medication is not needed is valuable to many individuals, as evidenced by this reported increase. For many, cognitive and behavioral changes provided by skills-based modalities like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy offer patients the ability to make meaningful changes in their day to day lives, and to learn how to see their thinking differently in order to improve the symptoms of conditions like anxiety and depression.
The NPR article highlights an unhappy fact: according to “[NIH], the most recent national survey shows that only about half of all Americans with any mental illness received care in the prior year.” That can be due to a number of things, including refusal to receive care due to things like stigma, the inability to receive care due to an insufficient number of psychotherapists in a location, or the cost of care. But the increase over the years in the number of individuals seeking and receiving non-medicated therapeutic services is hopeful, and practices like City Center have been able to offer options that fit more individuals’ needs through paths like sliding scale fee options and telehealth.