Not all respondents are new to therapy. In fact, 56% of people surveyed switched from in-person therapy to online therapy in the past six months, most likely due to the COVID related protocol. But 1 in 5 of those surveyed started online therapy in the past three months. A small percentage of respondents, 1.2%, chose to postpone treatment until in-person options became available again.
Not everyone can attend weekly therapy sessions in an office setting, for reasons ranging from work to difficulty traveling. People who live in rural areas or who don't have adequate transportation may have no way to get to a therapist's office. Online therapy, on the other hand, can take the form of scheduled video conferences, live messaging, and phone calls at any time. As long as there is a stable internet connection, an online therapy session can be conducted.
Upon reading and signing the informed consent form, participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the Preference to Seek Online or In-Person Counseling Form, the Online Counseling Attitude Scale (OCAS), and the In-Person Counseling Attitude Scale (FFAS). For these reasons, like others, more and more people are turning to online therapy as an alternative. Given the current stigma against mental health, many people, especially young people, have turned to online therapy as a way to seek help for their mental health. In addition, a study conducted by the University of California at Berkeley showed that those patients who used online therapy had great improvements in their mental health and well-being.
Your health insurance may cover part or all of your mental health care, but it generally doesn't cover online therapy. Online Counseling and found that a significant proportion of university students in Malaysia would prefer to receive mental health counseling online. In contrast, an online counselor offering text therapy, which has in fact been proven to be an effective therapeutic modality, can work with several patients simultaneously. Online therapy and remote treatment programs are radically changing the way people receive support for mental health and drug addiction.
Even so, such online therapy raises concerns about patient privacy, as well as legal and ethical issues, including issues of interjurisdictional practice, for providers who hire to work for these companies, who may not share the same code of conduct and commitment not to cause harm, he says Deborah Baker, JD. director of legal and regulatory policy for the APA Practice Directorate. In any case, because online therapy is much cheaper than traditional in-person therapy, most people prefer to pay out of pocket. The good news is that online therapy statistics seem favorable for treatment methods since the beginning of the pandemic.
In addition to supplementing professionals' incomes with new patients, offering online therapy can help them maintain a better work-life balance, Henderson says. These statistics alone are sufficient to demonstrate that online therapy is a viable alternative to traditional therapy. In addition to billing information, there is no need to share any other personal information with an online therapy service.
