Talkspace Therapy and Support

I never review apps in the App Store but since this is an important app that does provide a vital service to people I thought I’d write in my experience with it so far. I’ve been using Talkspace for almost a month now and I understand that the therapists on here also have their actual practice with in-person clients as well and I respect that they can respond to my messages whenever they get the chance but my first therapist would respond to me maybe a couple times a week at most so I ended up changing therapists and that was mildly annoying having to go through the reintroduction process with the new therapist all over again and explain what my problems/issues are and while she has been more responsive, I have had issues where my therapist and I would try to schedule my monthly live session and she never called/initiated the session at the agreed upon time. I think there needs to be a way for the client to be able to try and initiate the live session at the agreed upon time or also have there be a way to kind of send over the messages to the new therapist when you try to switch therapists so you don’t have to start all over and spend your and hour new therapists time going over everything again.

I can’t call this a substitute for in-person therapy (full disclosure: in addition to using Talkspace I have an in-person therapist. I also am in school to be a therapist) but it has been an extremely helpful addition to my life. My in-person therapist can’t be there for me all the time but this form of ... what my Talkspace therapist and I think of as “interactive journaling” ... is always there for me when I need it even though the therapist only offers a little feedback twice a day. It’s not what she says so much as having the safe space to express myself and knowing she’s witnessing in a nonjudgmental way. We have a bond even though we’ve never met. I didn’t give the app five stars because the notification system is all screwed up and the tech support seems absent. The price has gone up since I subscribed but this may still be a great value for many. It’s so helpful to be able to write anytime in spite of a busy life. Maybe it would also help people who can’t get out of the home. They do not advertise it but after you’ve been using the app for a while you can switch to a maintenance plan where the therapist checks in once a week and I plan to make that switch soon to save money.

It sounds crazy, I know, but my therapist and the app saved my life. I was able to preserve some anonymity about issues I skirted in many a therapist’s office. Sometimes due to anxiety and stress around going to a therapist office, I would continually reschedule and ultimately never go. I’ve also paid some hefty penalties for forgetting or missing appointments. I know my story isn’t unique. It enabled my husband who also has anxiety to seek help, which I believe saved his life, also. Both of us express ourselves far better in writing than speaking. Please don’t let the idea of therapy impede your recovery. If you don’t feel comfortable revealing who you are like I did, you don’t have to use video chat or photos, but of course that is an option if you choose to use it. My only issue is that there seems to be a deficit of therapists who are also people of color, and additionally men. My husband is happy with his therapist, but I know he felt badly that he couldn’t seek someone out as a therapist who understands what it is like to be routinely discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Maybe Talkspace as a company could be more proactive in seeking more diversity in hiring.

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I really like the promise behind this app: getting to talk to your therapist anytime, anywhere. I could text her/him as soon as I’m going trough something. Unfortunately, the experience is more like when you text your friends and they reply when they’re free, hours later, and the conversation is just not the same. I think it puts a lot of expectations on the therapist response. Since they were only going to reply twice a day (sometimes once, always with a single text more like an email response), then the expectation is higher than with an in-person therapist. You expect a message that is going to move the conversation forward faster. But no, it was mostly texts repeating what I said, to make sure she understood and stuff like that. That’s normal in the first sessions of therapy, but at this rate I was going to spend months to make the same progress that I would have made with two in-person sessions. At the end, that’s more expensive. I think there is an audience for this type of therapy, but the execution needs to be better. Train the therapist for a text-based sessions. How can they do things differently in this format? Maybe offering the service to therapist to use in combination with offline sessions? I don’t know. I just know that I had all the intentions and budget to make this a recurrent expense because I know the value of mental health, but it didn’t work for me.

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I could write two pages on how bad this service is. From the $49 a week claim, that is actually $200 per month, to the “text your therapist anywhere, anytime”, which is actually MAYBE two emails a day. You read that right. $200 per month minimum for hopefully two emails per day. You don’t have live access to your therapist at any time and if you’re like me and tend to be on the more severe side of mental illness then this app will be useless to you. To sum it all up what they do is cram as many patients into as big a group as possible so a “therapist” can invest the least amount of work to extract the greatest amount of profit. Now not to say that they dont give the minimum amount of effort in addressing your problems because they do and some genuinely care about helping you. But the fact remains two emails a day does very little to aid any scenario. For $200 a month we deserve MUCH more. In my area I can personally meet a therapist face to face for $30 an hour and cover as much ground as talk space would need at least six months to do. The idea is good but the execution is very poor. This is not good online therapy for anyone in its current form. There is absolutely no freebies, credit, or sexual favors you could possibly offer me to make me take even one more day of this pathetic excuse for therapy. Delete your app and end the suffering you are causing all like me and we’ll call it even.