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Why I ended my Talkspace online therapy subscription

A review

By Lucy Dan (she/her/她)Published 3 years ago 12 min read
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Why I ended my Talkspace online therapy subscription
Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

I've used Talkspace for a total of one year (six months beginning 2019 and six months beginning 2020), and my ultimate decision is to step away from them indefinitely.

I'm sharing my own story of my personal opinions and personal experiences to validate that navigating mental health care is a difficult journey. These are strictly my own opinions. My main hope is that in sharing this, you can feel less alone in this process of accessing healthcare.

I've also provided pointers for how I might have approached this platform differently, or how to manage some of the disadvantages. I did this because rather than pitching this as a "never use Talkspace" article, it's more of a "here's all the things I wish I considered" article.

Honestly, when you first access therapy anywhere, you're already overwhelmed and it's hard to consider all the bits and pieces.

I'm here for that. Here are some considerations that you can digest before you make decisions about your money and your healthcare.

Let's dive on in, shall we?

Pros of Talkspace

By Katya Austin on Unsplash

You'll find some of these perks listed as part of Talkspace's, and being an honest review, there are aspects that I liked about their service.

Switching Therapists

You can switch therapists with a click of a button, which gives you suggestions for three new therapists each time. At this time, you'll see the following information:

  • A brief written introduction to the therapists' orientation
  • (Optional, not all therapists have this) a video introduction which elaborates more on how they approach to therapy; some therapists share more personal tidbits about hobbies so that you can feel a little more comfortable approaching them.
  • The typical schedule they respond. You can see the spread of how regularly they respond or whether it's more of a sporadic schedule.
  • Any potential scheduled days off.

I found the scheduling super helpful because I found it easier to work with a therapist who would respond by a certain time every day because it was part of their routine. Because if I don't build a routine around something I'm going to forget it.

I also really loved the video aspect because often you don't really get to get a snapshot into what a therapist is like before you meet them in flesh for the first time, and if the fit isn't right, it's a full hour session of discomfort.

Cheaper than in-person therapy

This was why I initially accessed online therapy in the first place. I maxed out my school insurance for in-person sessions and still wanted to build some additional skills. The base plan for online therapy for a whole month roughly costed the same as one (1) in-person session ($196USD per month), and I was really drawn to that.

In my case, I was pretty lucky to have a graduate student union that negotiates such a high salary for Teaching Assistants. (Interpret this in the context that we're not allowed to work additional hours elsewhere at the risk of losing scholarships. I'm basically carving 6h or 12h worth of money from rent and food and tuition).

Someone working at the minimum wage of $15CAD/hour has to work four whole days to afford one session per week of in-person therapy. And even that is a best-case scenario because the Canadian minimum wage is comparably higher than a lot of other places.

At the heart of it, I was attracted to Talkspace because it was relatively affordable.

Daily Messages

In-person therapy is typically once a week. Talkspace therapy can be twice daily, five days a week if you want it to be. Therapists typically respond to your texts twice a day on weekdays, which is great when you need that extra support.

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Cons

By Thomas Park on Unsplash

Daily Messages

Yes, I just listed this in the Pros section. It's a double-edged sword.

Daily messages also have a downfall and should be used carefully. Unlike in-person therapy, I regularly felt a sort of "therapy burnout" from having to discuss traumas twice daily. Unlike in-person therapy, where you have the rest of the week to learn and practice skills, I felt the pressure to "make the best use of my plan" by responding twice a day.

That was true even when I was completely floored after responding and couldn't bring myself to do basic chores. There were points of my week where I did nothing else. Looking back, that's not healthy. I never went through this with in-person therapy. Yes, I was also completely floored after the session, but I would recuperate after that day and live out the next week fine.

Looking back, I realized that just because they respond twice a day, and just because it's part of the plan, doesn't mean you have to rush to respond twice a day, every day, always.

Most therapists I worked with set up their own routine and boundaries on replies. We should too. Use this wisely.

How to manage this: If you do end up choosing to do online therapy, make sure you set up your own boundaries about when to access this because unlike other therapy formats, you can use the room 24/7 to drop thoughts. It doesn't mean that this will always be good.

Lack of cultural competency

There are very few therapists who are trained in cultural competency on this platform. The ones who were trained were better equipped to work with new immigrants than say, someone like me, who is really stuck in the middle, sees both views and struggles with being Not Quite Either. This problem is not unique to Talkspace and occurs in the broader context of therapists in general.

But, I was told by community therapists that accessing online therapy might open up to more opportunities because the barrier of location is no longer an issue and there's a bigger pool to choose from.

What I learned is that therapists lack cultural competency regardless of platform and this lack of training is part of a bigger problem.

On Talkspace, there were therapists who asked why I didn't just assimilate to North American culture and adopt the theory that codependency is unhealthy. This sounds like a fair statement until I contextualize that this was in response to my question about how the concept of codependency works in a culture where the self/other is more overlapped. Instead of getting an answer that takes this into account, I just got a "well, you're here now, you should be like this". Honestly, as a curious person I just wanted to know, but was labelled as resistant and impeding my own recovery. This was not okay.

Another therapist had me step through a thought record and labelled my thoughts about implicit racial bias as "mind-reading" and "jumping to conclusions". These are types of cognition distortions according to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which, as it was explained to me, is supposed to help people reframe consistently negative thoughts into more realistic ones. Her filter was that the "reality" is that there is no implicit bias or that I could not prove that it was implicit bias, and so necessarily I had to change my automatic thoughts to align with the belief that implicit bias is not a thing. Her reality was not my reality. I was again labelled as resistant.

Maybe they were both right and that in order to get better I had to embrace both positions. Maybe they were wrong. I don't have the answers. But as someone who is naturally curious, I wanted to know the why behind the theory and the how of applying this theory liberally across cultures. And in asking those questions I was told to "just listen" and to "not be resistant to my recovery", which is not collaborative and definitely not my style of healthcare.

How to manage this: If you ever find yourself in this situation, I don't have the answers for whether the application of those skills were correct or not. Maybe we were just not a good fit. But I learned that what "not a good fit" meant for me is when a therapist or healthcare professional doesn't answer my questions - it's something I value and I don't budge on that value.

Now I share my story so that therapists and therapists-to-be can see this and better prepare themselves to work with POC clients and to see that sometimes these clients come in with a different perspective. Please read this if you fall in that boat.

Racism in Healthcare and What We Can Do About It

Racism touches every aspect of society, including healthcare. As health care providers, we have an ethical obligation…medium.com

To Talkspace, I encourage you to hire more culturally trained therapists, ones who are ready to work with more than just new immigrants.

To others POCs - when you're ready, share your story, amplify others' views, and advocate for yourself because you have every right to.

Marketing

I personally did not like the marketing tactics and found that this kind of marketing doesn't typically occur within direct interactions with therapists in the community.

Let me describe what the marketing was.

When you end a subscription, you go through an exit survey which suggests:

  • Pausing the subscription instead of ending it
  • Switching a therapist to find a better match
  • Getting a discount

If you go through and still decide to end the subscription, you get another email a few days before your subscription actually ends with a final prompt to consider going back to the service with a discount code.

I fell for every step of this marketing.

I've paused the subscription and gone back. I've switched therapists and gone back. I've used the discount, thinking that I was getting a better deal. I've gone through the exit survey and thought it would be the end of my subscription to therapist, and still went back, thinking that I was getting a better deal by applying a discount.

What's wild is that I don't fall for these tactics when retail companies do this to me. I ended my Netflix subscription without batting an eye. I'm not used to feeling the scarcity that these companies try to build with these exit flows because I was never desperate to access the services. Sure, I'll miss Netflix shows but it was easy for me to just watch Korean dramas on Viki (for free, might I add).

I was desperate for therapy. I was managing ongoing abuse and graduate school stress and fam, can I just repeat,

I was desperate for therapy.

At first I shamed myself for having fallen into the marketing because it's clear that I knew better, because I've successfully fended this off in other contexts. I felt guilty for not fending this off when it mattered the most.

The paradox, however, is that when you need the mental capacity to fend off marketing tactics that may influence your decision to appropriate healthcare, you are likely not in the best emotional state, because you're seeking help to manage those emotions in the first place.

It wasn't until Greg Mckeown's Essentialism book where he introduced the concept of "sunken cost bias" that I shifted my perspective. When faced with situations where we've already invested time and money, we sometimes want to stick with something to "get our money's worth". Which typically has us throwing more money at something that isn't worth it.

Sunken cost bias best described the reasons why I was sticking with this platform. I already decided that I'd exhausted the Talkspace pool of therapists who were culturally trained and didn't find a good fit on their platform after 12 months. However, I stayed on because "I was getting a good deal".

To me, "getting a good deal" is not a valid reason to stay in therapy.

How to manage this: Before you choose to start or leave therapy, I've found it helpful to jot down all my thoughts in a journal (free-style) and then try to organize it into pros/cons.

Marketing typically taps into FOMO (fear of missing out). When journalling, I can see what emotions pop out from my thoughts and I learn what I think I'm missing out on (i.e., not getting therapy, losing my chance to save money when I'm already on a tight budget).

It's important to note because when you're aware of the FOMO, you can also see how marketing tries to sell quick fixes to that FOMO (subscribe to me!), and you can choose to problem-solve it your way.

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I concluded that for my own mental healthcare, the best course of action was to take a break and really dig into finding someone who has worked with racialized immigrants. I want to work with someone in person instead of via a digital platform, meaning I will wait until the COVID-19 restrictions ease up before launching myself back into this search.

If you're embarking on a journey to access in-person or online therapy, I wish you all the best. Don't forget that as a client, you're allowed to have boundaries, to have expectations. You're allowed to advocate for your needs. Sometimes this paints you as a finicky or resistant client. Reflect on whether that's truly the case. If it is, good news! A therapist can work with you to change that. If it's a therapist's perception of you and you disagree, you are 100% allowed to phrase that. And if they're still unwilling to work with that or to consider things from your view, you are absolutely allowed to find someone who is a better fit.

You can do it. You are not alone in this.

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Lucy (the egg girl) is a graduate student who advocates for mental health and self-care in academia. She writes all of these author bios from scratch every time with the hope that the author bios will get better over time. Only time will tell.

She also feels really weird speaking in third person but you can remedy that by tweeting an egg gif to her here.

This piece was first published here.

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Lucy Dan (she/her/她)

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