Therapy Has Made Its Way to Mobile Phones

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Photo Courtesy of Wall Street Journal

A preview of what the Talkspace app looks like when using it.

Alyssa Pepito, Photojournalist

With just a click on your phone, a therapist is there at your fingertips. There is a good amount of apps out there that help with various things such as anxiety and mental issues. That is why there is mobile therapy in which these apps have slightly risen over the past year. Although they have held some problems in the past, it’s still working its way up the ladder. An app called Talkspace was released in 2012, and has been proven worthy since then. For convenience, the apps are available on many different devices like Android or Apple.

Surely, people do not want to spend time dressing up and driving to their therapist. Apps such as these are convenient for the ones who want to keep laid back at home while still wanting to talk about their own problems. One can text or even video chat with their personal therapist at almost any time, whether waiting at the airport and feeling anxious or just not feeling like stepping foot out of the house.

With the app, there are still costs that come with this package, just like the real thing. The costs of physically going to see a therapist would be roughly $200 an hour just to talk about one’s own problems, however, with a mobile phone, it’s only about $4.50 a day. A real therapist can speculate that mobile mental health apps will be a great addition to ongoing in-person therapy, but not a total substitution. Virtual therapists are available 24 hours a day and the real ones make their best attempt to be there for their patients. Either way, both are still helpful. Some therapy apps are being designed to help patients track moods or even predict psychotic breaks.

According to a writer at Wall Street Journal named Jessica Caldwell, her personal experience was well worth it. She says, “it was [personal therapist], a woman I have never met in person, who helped me through a career switch, a hellish stretch of wedding planning and a move to suburbia.” This shows how greatly the therapist from Talkspace helped with her anxiety.

Phoebe Duong (11) supports the helpful apps and likes how “they are really helping people with anxiety and it’s good to see such a positive outcome out of both a virtual and real life therapist, even though both of them are through a mobile phone.” All in all, these anti-anxiety apps are quite a piece of work and are proven to help those with anxiety and mental issues.