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Wellness Wednesday for September 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Online therapy services (like BetterHelp) are basically mental health fast food. I tried one because it was so convenient and cheap, and I quickly realized that my therapist was unlikely to tell me anything that had not already occurred to me.

I finally found a psych professor at the local university who sees a few patients on the side (I basically had to audition to get accepted). It's pretty damn expensive, but I'm getting much more out of it. I guess it's good that the fast food option exists for those who can't afford anything else, but I wonder how much people are getting out of it.

I tried BH and was extremely unhappy with it

I’ve heard Better Help is particularly bad. Can you say more about what went wrong in your experience?

There really needs to be an easier way to access therapy, but these services are not hitting the mark. There’s also a part of me that wonders if the problem is just that most therapists aren’t very good.

I told them I hate business speak (and this is a problem itself), but consultants didn't answer (no scripted answer for it)

In the end I got "tell us how we should help you". What?

No, I think it's general problem with medicine where feedback loop is slow and weak.

Medicine is one of oldest sciences around but a lot of its arsenal was quack interventions, for centuries.