In relation to a previous post I made about tele-therapy, I happened to hear about Lisa Kudrow’s internet tv series, web therapy, that spoofs therapy over the internet. So…I searched on google to check it out (it is pretty funny, btw), but the first link that google pulled up was webtherapy.com. Curious, I searched around the site, where it discussed the benefits of using the webtherapy service. Here’s an example from the site:
Webtherapy is a unique, affordable, confidential online counseling service which provides an ongoing relationship with your own personal licensed psychotherapist.
Webtherapy allows you to communicate to your therapist as often as you like (daily, or more than once a day, if you wish), by leaving private messages on a secure, personal site. Up to five days a week, once each day, your therapist will provide helpful responses and therapeutic interventions.
Webtherapy provides you maximum security in an encrypted environment to ensure the absolute confidentiality of your interactions with your therapist. You can capture your thoughts and feelings on the spot, rather than waiting up to a week for your next therapy session in an office. And you can feel confident that no one–not even your family–needs to know about your webtherapy.
As I understand it, when you sign up you get to contact your therapist as much as you want when you want through leaving messages on a secure part of the web therapy website that is only used by you and your therapist. This is interesting to me, and perhaps the way this is used is similar to asking a client to write down their thoughts between therapeutic sessions, encouraging the tech savy client to use a secure website rather than a pen and paper. However, the information above states that as a client you have your own personal therapist at your disposal once a day and your therapist can respond back to you up to 5 times a week. Would that make the contact between client and therapist closer to traditional psychoanalysis (3-5x per week), or does it blur the temporal boundaries of the therapeutic relationship since the client does not seem to make and keep an appointment but rather logs in when he/she feels like it?
The website also states that they have a large staff membership of highly qualified professionals who specialize in many different populations. They do not disclose the pricing or how payments work, nor do they give out the names and credentials of their therapists. The site does, however, offer many reassurances of confidentiality, ethical standards and states that all the therapists are indeed “licensed professional psychologists, licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors”. I thought that maybe if I clicked on the “sign up” link on the website, I may get a better idea of cost and more information on the different types of web therapists, however, the message that I got when trying to sign up stated that they were no longer accepting new registrations. This was surprising to me, as it seems to imply that they had so many clients that the practices of the numerous web therapists were full at this time.
I am left with many questions about webtherapy and tele-therapy, so much so that I am still trying to tease out what my questions and concerns really are…just another reason why its so important to be thinking about this new frontier of therapy.