Afford Betterhelp – Psychology & Depression

they ask you to create an account …Afford Betterhelp…and then you established your payment choices i’ll talk about this a bit more later but there are scholarships that can reduce the cost and then you can also change your choice on how often

you wish to pay so if you pay weekly that’s the most pricey but you can also pay in advance which will make the expense less expensive for you total and then based on your answers to your concerns in the formerly pointed out questionnaire they will match you with a therapist i’m going to utilize the words therapist and therapist interchangeably throughout this video however that’s not necessarily the case and i think that much better help offers both types of mental health professionals so simply keep that in mind once they match you with your counselor you have the ability to consult with them and you can set up a time to have your first official conference so it can either be through a video call through a routine phone call or through a chat or immediate message i always do video calls however it is great to understand that all four options three actually to me however they state it’s 4 are available and i understand that’s definitely good for some individuals who are perhaps a bit more worried about therapy or not thinking about doing a video call since it makes them uncomfortable 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 after that you wait on your counselor to sign up with and they will connect you to the session when they do a little bell ring and after that you’re ready to go and you can begin having your your meeting during your first session you’re most likely going to have simply a learn more about you kind of session to find out why are you thinking about treatment what things do you want to resolve what are your preferences as someone going to therapy what are your therapists preferences and what’s their design of therapy all of those things will probably get hashed out in the very first meeting and then with time you’ll get more comfortable with one another and you’ll have more of those like deeper

sessions where you can speak about your problems and whatever it is that you wish to deal with and after that as time goes on you’ll have sessions however you paid for it or nevertheless you set it up with your counselor so with my therapist in particular i think this does differ by therapist but we do weekly sessions for one hour and i pay 35 dollars a week broken down however i have actually spent for all of my sessions beforehand to get that more affordable rate so let’s carry on to the pros and the cons of the platform i believe among the most significant pros of better help is that it is an online therapy service and that makes it extremely convenient and really accessible for most people as long as you have a web connection you can choose a variety of different ways to meet your therapist so you can do text video calls or phone calls they send you tips about your consultation so it’s pretty difficult to forget when you have a time established they send you both e-mail suggestions and text pointers and they send them to you a couple of days ahead and likewise a few hours ahead and a few minutes ahead so it’s a bit overkill however uh definitely reliable and another cool feature of them having a digital platform is that they offer digital group sessions and webinar type of sessions that are available to anyone who uses betterhelp completely for free it’s at no extra expense to what you already pay for your weekly sessions with your counselor now that being stated in my viewpoint the app and the platform is not great in fact it sort of draws particularly thinking about that 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 mean i guess they’re selling the network but i think truly what they’re offering is the tool and it’s not an excellent one it’s pretty cumbersome there are no alternatives for screen sharing Afford Betterhelp

or messaging or chatting throughout a session photos are shared very oddly they’re shared as files and you can just send them separately so you can’t like drag and drop into a window or something you need to like browse choose the photo then put it in and then the individual can’t see a sneak peek of the photo they need to click into the file to see it it’s just really out-of-date small things like when you press enter in the chat window your messages do not send it actually produces a line break so

So yes in the answer to Afford Betterhelp…I’m also going to tell you how you can get two weeks free of better help services but first if you’re new to the channel my name is Lauren and I make videos about what it’s like living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder okay so before I get started I just want to let you know that there is a link in the description below to access the two weeks free trial membership to better help you can try it completely risk free no strings attached and see how you like it um so what is better help better help is an online therapy service that is kind of an alternative to in-person therapy a subscription to better help gives you access to a therapist basically whenever and it includes unlimited text audio and video messaging as well as a weekly live session now I’ve tried this out and my therapist said that you can kind of break up those weekly sessions however you see fit – so she said you can have maybe three 20-minute sessions or a one-hour session it’s kind of whatever fits your schedule and whatever fits your needs the best so I myself have tried it out like I said I have a therapist through better help and

it’s really really simple communicating with them they have a website that’s very easy to interact with as well as an app on your phone that you can send instant messages through you can you can voice call through you can even video chat through and it’s really really easy to navigate so I want to talk to you a bit more about my experience with better help to kind of give you an idea about what it’s like using it so it took me a while to find the right therapist if I’m being honest so um I tried out a few therapists to begin with none of them really felt like a good fit and that’s really important I think even when finding a therapist out in the real world with in-person interactions is that you need to really work at finding one who’s going to be a really good fit for you and there’s this it’s no exception for better help either so don’t be afraid to try out different therapists if the first one you get doesn’t feel like the best fit you can keep searching until you find like you have a really good rapport with the therapist that you’re matched up with the service makes it really easy to just switch therapists when I felt like I wasn’t really connecting with my first couple therapists I just selected I think it’s just an option in the app where you can look for a different therapist you can read their BIOS and figure out more about them and select which one you would like to

work with so I think part of why I wasn’t really that impressed to begin with with those first therapists was that they were initially giving me kind of canned responses which didn’t really sit well when I was opening up to them about personal things that I needed help with and they were just kind of giving me a canned response that I it was kind of obvious that they just sent to everyone so this is another thing that I would really encourage you to just kind of push past I think they deal with a lot of people and so the canned response is kind of an easy way for them to kind of gather more information quickly from you so if you can push past this and if you can kind of try to communicate with them more it will become more personal and more more individualized so the way I communicated with my therapist through better help was initially by a text where we just kind of got to know each other a little bit more and just send some information back and forth about each other and then we had a voice call where I had an hour-long session with her and we just kind of chatted about what it was that I felt I needed help with she got more background information about me we just kind of got more comfortable with each other by voice call and then just this past week I had my first video chat with her and it was really really great I was really impressed I first I was a little leery about if I would be able to form enough of a rapport with someone just through video and without that in person interaction but it actually came quite easily and I feel like it was really really helpful okay so now I want to get into some of the benefits and drawbacks of better help that I found so starting with the benefits I think it’s a really really accommodating and accessible platform in terms of methods of communication that you have with your therapist as well as timing of communication so they’re kind of available all throughout the days even weekends they kind of your therapist will kind of let you know what they’re kind of operating hours are and they’ll usually respond to you anytime during those hours also there’s a wide range of different ways you can Afford Betterhelp

communicate with your therapist so by text by voice call by video call even by video messaging if you don’t want to have a live chat so it’s really really accommodating in terms of your comfort level and in terms of how you feel that you will get the best help and the accessibility is also really great so I mentioned that they have an app on the phone so through the app it’s kind of it’s pretty basic but you can you can chat with your therapist through the messaging app you can also keep a journal there’s a little section where you can fill in a journal about how you’re feeling and just kind of keep a log that you can then share with your therapist if you want but otherwise it’s kept it’s kept private just for you unless you want to share it with your therapist you can schedule schedule appointments with your therapist there’s group in ours that you can attend so there’s one for anxiety and depression one for wellness one for relationships a skill building series and one for anxiety so there’s a lot of different kinds of group webinars that are really great too so that’s kind of