How does it work? Better Help Podcast Sponsor…
After filling in a questionnaire to ascertain what particular flavour of mental you are, you’re paired with a counsellor, who you can mercilessly switch for a various one at any time. (I got Dr. Laura Dabney, from Virginia). You then start an immediate messaged treatment session that both you and your counsellor can drop in and out of, and which could, in theory, go on and on up until one of you ultimately died.
What does it cost?
You get a free seven-day trial – just like a totally free Netflix or Amazon Prime trial, except with way more questions about what your childhood was like. After that, it costs from �,� 24.50 a week for endless message-based counselling and one ‘totally free’ phone session with your counsellor per month. Yeah, I don’t get how it’s free either, but whatever.
How much is BetterHelp monthly?
Filtering that through immediate messaging may be useful if you find the idea of baring your soul to a complete stranger a bit awks. You will not get the same connection similar to face-to-face counselling, but the semi-anonymity might make it easier to open if you’ve 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 stress and anxiety, what activates it– social situations, satisfying people for the first time– and after that dived headlong into my fractious childhood (divorced parents, strained familial relationships, bullied in junior school). She was pretty nosey tbh, but then that’s her task, isn’t it?
Overall, the service is remarkably slick. The discussion can be a little stop-starty at times, but it was in fact a far smoother and more on-tap experience than I expected. I even got rapid actions to messages over the weekend, which was unforeseen.
Talkspace vs Betterhelp
The fact you can edit messages before sending them indicates you’re not likely to blurt out something revealing and vulnerable in the heat of the minute. So extensive moments of realisation might be hard to come by if you can’t get an unwinded flow going.
Who do I think it might it be good for?
Anybody with a low-end mental health concern who’s cool with getting counselled in an extremely internet-y, 2016-y method. If you’re living under the blackest, bleakest cloud you can possibly imagine and need major attention (and potentially some medications), probably isn’t for you Better Help Podcast Sponsor