How does it work? Aetna Betterhelp…
After filling in a questionnaire to determine what specific flavour of mental you are, you’re paired with a counsellor, who you can mercilessly swap for a various one at any time. (I got Dr. Laura Dabney, from Virginia). You then begin an immediate messaged therapy session that both you and your counsellor can drop in and out of, and which could, in theory, continue up until one of you eventually died.
What does it cost?
You get a complimentary seven-day trial – similar to a complimentary Netflix or Amazon Prime trial, except with method more concerns about what your childhood was like. After that, it costs from �,� 24.50 a week for unlimited message-based counselling and one ‘complimentary’ phone session with your counsellor each month. Yeah, I do not get how it’s totally free either, however whatever.
How much is BetterHelp monthly?
Filtering that through immediate messaging might be useful if you find the concept of baring your soul to a complete stranger a bit awks. You won’t get the same connection just like in person counselling, but the semi-anonymity may make it easier to open if you have actually been consuming 2 bottles of rum and dancing around in your dead nan’s bridal gown every night.
She first established the scale of my anxiety, what activates it– social circumstances, meeting individuals for the very first time– and then dived headlong into my fractious childhood (divorced parents, stretched familial relationships, bullied in junior school). She was quite nosey tbh, however then that’s her job, isn’t it?
In general, the service is impressively slick. The conversation can be a little stop-starty at times, but it was actually a far smoother and more on-tap experience than I anticipated. I even got speedy responses to messages over the weekend, which was unexpected.
Talkspace vs Betterhelp
The truth you can edit messages before sending them means you’re not likely to blurt out something unguarded and revealing in the heat of the moment. So profound moments of realisation might be difficult to come by if you can’t get an unwinded flow going.
Who do I believe it might it benefit?
Anybody with a low-end mental health issue who’s cool with getting counselled in a really internet-y, 2016-y method. If you’re living under the blackest, bleakest cloud you can possibly imagine and require major attention (and perhaps some meds), probably isn’t for you Aetna Betterhelp