How does it work? Better Help Rice…
After filling out a survey to establish what particular flavour of psychological 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 start an instantaneous messaged therapy 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 eventually died.
What does it cost?
You get a free seven-day trial – just like a free Netflix or Amazon Prime trial, other than with way more questions about what your childhood was like. After that, it costs from , 24.50 a week for unrestricted message-based counselling and one ‘free’ phone session with your counsellor monthly. Yeah, I don’t get how it’s totally free either, however whatever.
How much is BetterHelp monthly?
If you discover the concept of baring your soul to a complete stranger a bit awks, filtering that through immediate messaging might be valuable. You won’t get the exact same connection just like face-to-face counselling, however the semi-anonymity might make it simpler to open up if you’ve been drinking two bottles of rum and dancing around in your dead nan’s wedding dress every night.
She first determined the scale of my anxiety, what triggers it– social scenarios, meeting individuals for the very first time– and then dived headlong into my fractious youth (divorced parents, stretched familial relationships, bullied in junior school). She was quite nosey tbh, but then that’s her task, isn’t it?
In general, the service is remarkably slick. The discussion can be a little stop-starty sometimes, however it was really a far smoother and more on-tap experience than I anticipated. I even got fast reactions to messages over the weekend, which was unforeseen.
Talkspace vs Betterhelp
The fact you can edit messages before sending them means you’re not likely to blurt out something revealing and vulnerable in the heat of the moment. So profound moments of realisation may be hard to come by if you can’t get a relaxed flow going.
Who do I believe it might it benefit?
Anybody with a low-end psychological health issue 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 serious attention (and potentially some meds), most likely isn’t for you Better Help Rice