E-Therapy in 2011

This is very interesting because E-Therapy ( Online Therapy ) has been going on for years and years, but like the article says, " little has changed..." I think the reason why E-Therapy will never beat face-to-face therapy is because its not as personal. People want to feel a personal security with their therapist and the online world has gotten loads of unsecured vibes. Another good point is that people want to actually step away from normal routine and life to go take time to meet with a therapy and do horse therapy. Heres the view from an E-Therapist...

"Colleagues, acquaintances, e-patients, media and others often ask me, “What’s the state of online therapy? Does it have a future?” My answer hasn’t changed significantly in the past decade, for good reason — very little has changed in the field.

For folks who may be unawares, I’ve been a part of the mental health landscape and online therapy since the early 1990s, and e-therapy specifically when it started to hit the scene hard in the late 1990s. In fact, I coined the term “e-therapy” to describe online psychotherapy — a specific modality of psychotherapy that utilizes many techniques and features of traditional face-to-face psychotherapy. In 1999, I joined an e-therapy startup — HelpHorizons.com — as the industry’s youngest COO and led that company to a successful acquisition years later.

There’s no dearth of professionals willing to give e-therapy a try. In fact, when we ran HelpHorizons in the early 2000s, we had over 1,000 professionals at one point who signed up for the service.

What we lacked were people who actually utilized or wanted to utilize the service. And that’s the key problem with online psychotherapy: It’s a great modality that few consumers actually want to use.

Over the years, I’ve talked with dozens of people who’ve tried out e-therapy. I always ask them the same question, “Why did you stop?” Two factors have emerged — cost and face-to-face is more authentic a therapy experience.

So all that leaves is paying for a real therapy interaction.

“If I have to schedule my online session just as I schedule a face-to-face session with a real-life therapist, I might as well see the real-life therapist,” is what I often hear. Which is what the vast majority of folks do when confronted with the actual costs and inconvenience of real-time, synchronous online therapy. Add to that that most insurance companies still do not cover the cost of online sessions, then it’s a no brainer. Face-to-face, traditional psychotherapy is often less expensive and more emotionally fulfilling than a comparable online therapy session."

Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/01/08/the-state-of-e-therapy-2011/

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