[NoZebra120vClip]

I was pleased to see that Hallow earned their seal of approval, or should I say it evaded their badge of shame? Hallow's a good app, professionally developed, and it's marketed tirelessly. I had my friend asking me if it was a good app to install. I don't know; I use other ones but not Hallow.

I was also pleased to see that "BetterHelp" earned the badge of shame. BetterHelp is just on this side of an outright scam. They contract with legitimate counselors and therapists and then cram their appointment books full of Zoom sessions. They claim that you can just send a quick text message to your "therapist" and get helped. But people aren't getting helped, they're just getting taken for a ride. This aggregation of gig-working counselors in an app is a really bad way to conduct this kind of business. It may work for a ride-hailing service, but not for mental health care. If you're thinking of using "BetterHelp" or one of its analogs, please instead consider doing your homework, finding a legitimate clinic or therapist who's licensed in your state, and do an intake directly with their practice. Many of them are now amenable to televideo appointments, and they will work with or without your insurance or on a sliding scale. There are really good therapists out there who don't need to be found on a janky app.

[EatingWithForks]

Of note one of the things not mentioned in "BetterHelp" is that the ability to not text your therapist at all hours of the day is actually very important for mental health. The therapist is a tool, not a crutch, and shouldn't be treated like a coping mechanism. A therapist is supposed to help teach and guide someone to develop healthier behavior patterns, and time away from the therapist to implement those patterns by onesself is very important.

[mustacheemperor]

BetterHelp is terrible. The dehumanizing, exhausting, money-seizing experience of trying to engage with their app was a net negative for my mental health when I tried to use it. They've taken the antipatterns used to extract effective monetization in social media apps and mobile games and applied them to people seeking help with their mental health. I've noticed they ingratiate themselves with corporate health benefits providers, etc too. I firmly believe someone in severe need of assistance would only feel worse after seeking help from that app.

I got as far as the conversation with my "onboarding coach", the licensed therapist who was supposed to find me a "good match" - and it became apparent she was either a bot or attending so little to the conversation she was unable to recognize information my earlier messages and apply it to later messages - it was like an automated customer support/service flow, but asking me highly personal questions about my mental health.

There's plenty of mediocre apps out there, but nothing has produced a simmering rage in me like the knowledge that BetterHelp exists and takes advantage of people who need help every day so their leadership and investors can try to get rich.

[mustacheemperor]

Oh, I just remembered: the onboarding "chat" was specifically advertised as a free, no committal part of the introduction process. After I declined to go further, they started billing me monthly for a subscription to therapy services I had never engaged to use, and I had to email them repeatedly to get the subscription stopped and the charges refunded.

Billed by the month for exchanging a dozen or so messages with a fake therapist. If you're a company leader and get the opportunity to include BetterHelp in your benefits package - don't.

[JohnMakin]

While you're not wrong, in many many states in the US, if not a majority of them, finding a therapist that is both a) covered by your insurance and b) accepting new patients can be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible. At the same time, demand for mental health care is steadily rising. That's why these apps do so well.

[NoZebra120vClip]

I've found that some of the best therapists don't accept any insurance at all, and it'd be foolish to limit one's choices to therapists who are covered by conventional health insurance.

One very good choice in my area is Catholic Charities. They have licensed counselors as well as students under supervision, and they charge a mere $35 per session. This is a great choice for those who are uninsured or have trouble getting in somewhere.

My Christian health sharing ministry shared all costs for a Catholic therapist while I was seeing him. Since this is not a "health insurance" arrangement, I didn't need to worry about whether he was in-network or approved; he just submitted his bills to them. My health sharing ministry also has a service that "reprices" bills, i.e. renegotiates them based on market rates and lops off overcharges that commonly occur.

And yeah, "BetterHelp" has this illusion of availability, and that can be very alluring to people in distress, and that's a dangerous thing. If someone gets mixed up with gig-worker counselors, they may find themselves worse off than when they started. "Good things come to those who wait", as it were.

[JohnMakin]

> and it'd be foolish to limit one's choices to therapists who are covered by conventional health insurance.

I mean, many people don't have a choice, or it's prohibitively expensive. Good for you if you have such flexibility.

[ebiester]

So long as you’re not LGBT, or considering an abortion, or any number of things that run afoul of the Catholics.

[NoZebra120vClip]

While I am neither LGBT nor abortion-minded, I found that Catholic Charities employs counselors and students from all walks of life, and not all of them are Catholic. Also, Catholic Charities serves everyone in the community, no matter what their faith or race or sexual preference. They are notable for their service to the refugee population, many of whom are Muslim. So I would say that you do them a disservice if you think that their counselors will argue with you over these issues, rather than supporting and respecting you as a person with things to work out.

[derefr]

> If you're thinking of using "BetterHelp" or one of its analogs, please instead consider [...a bunch of stuff that someone with an executive dysfunction could never manage to do]

[NoZebra120vClip]

If somebody's executive dysfunction is preventing them from going through the basic steps needed to get help for that very thing, then they seriously need to enlist the help of either a family member or a professional who can walk them through this and ensure that they succeed.

I'm not sure what the implication of this comment was, but hopefully it does not imply that "if my executive dysfunction prevents me from seeing a real professional then I'll press buttons on my phone and see a fake one instead", because that's a horrible life choice. Complete inaction would be significantly less harmful in a case like that.

[derefr]

> If somebody's executive dysfunction is preventing them from going through the basic steps needed to get help for that very thing, then they seriously need to enlist the help of either a family member or a professional who can walk them through this and ensure that they succeed.

You just said the same thing over again. How do you expect them to "enlist the help of a professional"? That's the whole (complex, multi-step) goal they're pursuing here!

(And, for many such people, they have no supportive family members. They live on their own, do the bare minimum each day at work, drag themselves home, microwave a TV dinner, and fall asleep. Think of them as "a car that doesn't have enough gas in the tank to drive to a gas station.")

> I'm not sure what the implication of this comment was

That lowering the barriers (and thus amount of willpower required) to get yourself initially introduced to someone who can help you with your problems even a little — even if they're not going to be able to help you really well with your problems — is valuable, because being helped even a little now means you have more willpower, that you can then use to access a higher-barrier-to-entry solution, and so on, in a cycle, incrementally bootstrapping your way to fully addressing your problem.

For an analogous situation: group therapy for gender dysphoria is hard to access. Web forums full of trans people you can talk to are easy to access. Those forums aren't structured to help you in the way that group therapy is, but it can at least help you overcome a crisis about whether you should acknowledge that you have a need that requires addressing in the first place.

Whether or not any particular approach or service that lowers barriers to accessing help, is good at doing that, should not be used to condemn the act of lowering barriers to accessing help itself. Just because BetterHelp is worse than nothing, doesn't mean that we should accept "nothing"; the barriers-to-access are still a problem to be solved, and we should still encourage people and companies who set out to try to solve it.