completely honest…Betterhelp Jim… evaluation of much better assistance i have actually been utilizing the service for a little over a year now and i think i’ve utilized it long enough to know what are the cons and pros so i’m going to walk you through all of those and after that give you my last ideas on whether i would recommend better assistance and whether or not i believe it’s the right service for you for those of you that don’t understand betterhelp is an online counseling platform that connects individuals who are looking for therapy or treatment with psychological health professionals it’s a quite easy process to start so initially you submit an online survey it asks you some concerns that will much better help match you with a therapist or a counselor so after you fill out what i would call a quite prolonged questionnaire they ask you to develop an account and after that you established your payment choices i’ll discuss this a little bit more later but there are scholarships that can decrease the price and then you can likewise alter your preference on how typically
you wish to pay so if you pay weekly that’s the most expensive but you can also pay ahead of time and that will make the cost less expensive for you total and after that based upon your answers to your concerns in the previously discussed questionnaire they will match you with a therapist i’m going to utilize the words therapist and therapist interchangeably throughout this video but that’s not necessarily the case and i believe that much better help offers both types of psychological health professionals so simply keep that in mind once they match you with your counselor you have the ability to speak to them and you can set up a time to have your very first main conference so it can either be through a video call through a routine phone call or through a chat or immediate message i constantly do video calls however it is great to understand that all four options 3 actually to me however they say it’s 4 are readily available and i understand that’s absolutely great for some individuals who are possibly a bit more nervous about treatment or not thinking about doing a video call since it makes them uneasy when the day of your session comes you can either log into the web browser or log in to the mobile app you can’t do both at the same time only one at a time and then you wait on your therapist to sign up with and they will link you to the session when they do a little bell ring and then you’re ready to go and you can start having your your conference during your first session you’re most likely going to have simply a be familiar with you type of session to determine why are you thinking about therapy what things do you wish to address what are your preferences as somebody participating in treatment what are your therapists choices and what’s their design of treatment all of those things will most likely get hashed out in the first conference and then with time you’ll get more comfortable with one another and you’ll have more of those like much deeper
sessions where you can talk about your problems and whatever it is that you wish to attend to and then as time goes on you’ll have sessions nevertheless you spent for it or nevertheless you set it up with your therapist so with my counselor in particular i think this does vary by counselor however we do weekly sessions for one hour and i pay 35 dollars a week broken down but i have actually paid for all of my sessions in advance to get that cheaper rate so let’s move on to the pros and the cons of the platform i think one of the biggest pros of much better help is that it is an online therapy service and that makes it very convenient and very accessible for the majority of people as long as you have a web connection you can select a range of different methods to consult with your counselor so you can do text video calls or phone calls they send you suggestions about your appointment so it’s pretty tough to forget when you have a time established they send you both email reminders and text tips and they send them to you a couple of days ahead and likewise a couple of hours ahead and a few minutes ahead so it’s a bit overkill but uh certainly efficient and another cool aspect of them having a digital platform is that they provide digital group sessions and webinar kind of sessions that are available to anyone who utilizes betterhelp completely for free it’s at no extra cost to what you already pay for your weekly sessions with your counselor now that being said in my opinion the platform and the app is not great in fact it kind of draws especially considering that much better assistance in and of itself is a tool the item that they’re offering is this video platform that therapists can utilize to link you to their network i indicate i guess they’re offering the network but i believe really what they’re selling is the tool and it’s not a very good one it’s pretty clunky there are no options for screen sharing Betterhelp Jim
or messaging or chatting throughout a session photos are shared really strangely they’re shared as files and you can just send them individually so you can’t like drag and drop into a window or something you need to like browse choose the image then put it in and then the person can’t see a sneak peek of the image they have to click into the file to see it it’s simply extremely outdated small things like when you push enter in the chat window your messages do not send it actually develops a line break so