Constant text-messaging and tiered pay<\/p>\n
Despite the disadvantages, some therapists find themselves remaining with a platform for years. They don\u2019t want to abandon their old clients, worry about seeing a drop in income or don\u2019t want the hassle of marketing their practice on their own and dealing with billing and insurance.<\/p>\n
Morgan Rakay<\/a>, who is based in Philadelphia\u2019s Roxborough\/Manayunk neighborhood, joined BetterHelp in 2017 to supplement her income from a group practice. She didn\u2019t fully leave the platform until 2023, despite her loathing of the constant text messaging.<\/p>\n \u201cA chat-based therapy session should not be therapy,\u201d she said. \u201cIf somebody gets to sit and pick their words very carefully, I can\u2019t tell if they\u2019re flat, I can\u2019t tell if they\u2019re manic. I can\u2019t tell if they\u2019re typing poorly because they\u2019re not a great keyboardist, versus maybe they\u2019re a little bit manic or psychotic. It just strips all of the tools that a therapist should really have to be able to be clinically sound. So I hate that.\u201d<\/p>\n The platform also expected her to be available to clients around the clock, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say that you set your own hours, but if you don\u2019t answer a client\u2019s text message within an hour or two hours, you started getting these alerts, and within 24 hours they would turn off your access. What if I\u2019m on vacation?\u201d she said. \u201cYou would then have to go to their team to say what happened and why, and to have them turn it back on for you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t respond to one client, and now I cannot interact with the 20 others. Suddenly, as a clinician, I have disappeared on my clients. That also feels really unsafe and unethical.\u201d<\/p>\n Another issue was the tiered compensation structure. Therapists report<\/a> being paid $30 per hour<\/a> for the first five hours per week, $35 for the next five hours, and so on, creating intense pressure to take on excessive workloads while accepting low earnings.<\/p>\n At the same time, sessions were generally scheduled for only 45 minutes, so Rakay wouldn\u2019t be paid for a full hour, she said. There was a per-word payment for messaging, but she often hit the payment cap if, for example, she had a verbose client.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so easy to think, I worked six hours today, I\u2019m going to make this much money,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the paycheck comes in and it\u2019s significantly less.\u201d<\/p>\n She wanted to leave, but she didn\u2019t want to cut off her clients and was worried about finding a different source of income.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get backed into these corners. I was the primary parent for two young kids while my husband was in med school and residency. I needed all of the flexibility that I could get, so in some ways, I felt a little bit stuck with it. I was already in that beast\u2019s jaws a little bit,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Eventually, Rakay phased out of BetterHelp and into her own private practice, which is thriving. She still uses Grow Therapy, a different type of platform that handles billing, insurance, video and some other functions but doesn\u2019t fully run the practice the way BetterHelp does.<\/p>\n But she said she still dislikes that it pressures clients to use an AI \u201ccoach\u201d between meetings, and asks therapists to let AI record and summarize sessions. She expects to eventually leave Grow as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Constant text-messaging and tiered pay Despite the disadvantages, some therapists find themselves remaining with a platform for years.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394,2986,33968,19970],"class_list":["post-923976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-psychiatry","tag-therapist","tag-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}