Reviews (1)

I've been to numerous counselors throughout my life for the past 20 years or so. Some of the issues I have faced were (starting from when I was younger up until now) my parent's divorce, depression, anxiety, my own divorce, couples counseling, relationship issues, and now sexual and gender identity issues. I'm going to give you my honest opinion of BetterHelp and it won't just be some B.S. coming from a robot.

Full disclosure, my motivation for writing this review is because they sent me a free t-shirt; however, this was just a kind gesture by them and I want to return the favor. The t-shirt is not in any way shape or form payment for me writing reviews for them. It'll take a whole lot more money than a free t-shirt for me to sell my credibility. Also, you might see this review on a bunch of different sites. It's because I'm too lazy to write individual reviews for each site so I'm just going to copy and paste on the sites BetterHelp suggested I could help them out on. I hope this doesn't come off as illegitimate to you. So without further adieu, here we go.

You can do counseling on your own schedule by chat, phone, or video. And you can leave messages for your counselor that they will respond to.

My counselor (at least) follows Cognitive Behavioral Therapy methods, which are good best practice standards for psychology and not just B.S.

Unbiased - My counselor and I have not seen eye to eye on every subject we've discussed. I've talked about some very controversial subjects that they disagreed fundamentally on with me such as whether or not there is a wage gap between men and women. Even though we strongly disagreed on the evidence, my counselor has never held a grudge. She handled the discussion professionally while still giving a good opinion and staying focused towards my treatment and not getting caught up in the details.

Price - I used to spend $120 a week going to a counselor in real life (with insurance). BetterHelp is less than half of what I used to pay (I believe it's $45 a week) and they offer more service than my IRL counselors ever did.

Privacy - For me, I live alone so there's nothing better than talking to a counselor from the privacy and comfort of my own home. Though I guess if you have a full house with kids and relatives and whatnot this could be considered a con as there is not really a good place to escape to from prying ears.

Reminders - They send you text reminders on your phone of when your appointment will be.

The web interface - Makes it easy to schedule appointments, connect with your counselor, write to your counselor, share attachments with your counselor, etc. It's pretty snazzy.

Connectivity can sometimes be crappy on VoIP calls. I have experienced some small issues with my counselor either coming through poor quality or disconnecting from the call when using the web interface. Typically though, she calls me right back and there has never been a catastrophic failure where we were not able to get reconnected and continue the counseling session that day.

Availability - My counselor is only available for phone/video sessions Tuesdays and Fridays. My schedule works fine for this. I'm not sure if all counselors on BetterHelp maintain this schedule or not, but this would not be very flexible for some people.