BetterHelpReviews of betterhelp.com

Summary: Betterhelp exemplifies what is wrong with the American healthcare system. If you cannot afford a $300 session per week that is not going to be covered by your insurance, you give Betterhelp a try for $80 a week. Of course you get a lower quality service. Nowhere does it say on the website how long the sessions actually last. You only find out later once you've already paid that a session is only intended to be 30 minutes. For $160 you could get a full hour with a good therapist. Betterhelp is the start to find a therapist quick if you really need help but you will be disappointed sooner than later. The therapist: in my few months of using the service I had two therapists. Both had issues with showing up on time for the scheduled sessions. Both seem to be untrained in how to handle a video call. I had to talk about my issues while looking at someone whose camera is shaking constantly, who is eating and drinking while giving me counseling, whose dogs are barking in the background or are jumping in front of the camera. Both seem distracted at times and had trouble listening. I think I found out why a bit later. My therapist told me that they are burned out by taking on so many sessions per day. I assume much of those $80 don't go to the therapist directly. While I felt like I was loosely guided towards the right questions to organize my thoughts and issues eventually, but 30 minutes are barely enough to explain the problem, let alone work on a solution. Sessions that the therapist canceled were never made up for and I still paid for the week. I could not help but feel a little bit scammed by Betterhelp which made me even more depressed thinking that I am out of any better options. I will recommend the service to someone who is in urgent need of counseling, but I would caution to lower expectations.

I personally did not find this platform a useful form of therapy. My first therapist I was matched with stood me up, and did not provide any communication as to why they did not make the appointment. Better Help did extend my subscription for a week. However the experience overall was disappointing. You are given roughly 30-45 minutes for a session, and was offered a default 30 minutes by my new therapist. However 30 minutes was just simply not enough time to have a useful session and ended up feeling rushed and slightly empty after my sessions as if we’d not really gone through the issues. When I requested 45 minutes on another occasion I was only given 35 minutes. I felt as if I was one of many clients (which I probably am but I shouldn’t feel like it), my therapist would yawn throughout my sessions and I felt as if I wasn’t given a specific catered approach and was just given generalised journals that i could get off google! Better help needs to extend their sessions and make sure their therapists actually have the time to give clients the sufficient help they need, we are paying customers after all. The approaches need to actually be personalised. If you’re someone who has had various other therapy sessions in the past with different companies this app may not work for you. I’ve had much better therapy experiences with other companies (for a third of the price!) in the past and this app just didn’t match up. This app is probably best catered to therapy first timers. Won’t be subscribing again.

This is pretty much the fast food drive-thru of therapy. I am not knocking every therapist on the site as I'm sure there are many that are well qualified. I got the feeling that most are signed up on here to pad their regular incomes, maybe some grocery money. Nothing wrong with that, but it does make you feel like an afterthought. As someone who has experienced a variety of therapists, this just seemed disheartening. Now for my first and last video call...Let's just say I have gotten more therapy standing in line at Stop & Shop than from this therapist. She was seemingly unqualified, a very poor listener and came up with a diagnosis within 30 minutes. This experience alone made me request a refund for the remaining sessions. However, there are a few others that I tried to connect with but offered only texting back and forth. How can this be effective?

My therapist was a no show

Therapists lack professionalism. They take calls in the car right after dropping off their kids. The background is noisy. The sessions are 50 mins rather than the promised 60 mins. You ask for video sessions and they are allowed to change them to Audio sessions (again so they can multitask while providing therapy). They claim they have PhDs and Psyds but when you ask for one support often says they’re not available. Overall not a good experience and when I asked for a refund I only got a partial one. Avoid.

It's going to be hard to review that one... First, the concept is absolutely AMAZING. Like, really. Being able to get emotional help via an app is extraordinary. I am not new to therapy, in fact, before signing up to BH, I had been in therapy for 10 years (on and off). Most of the sessions were online since that type of therapy has been around for many years. I wanted to give a chance to BH and got 50% off the first month. (Thanks to their covid19 promo!) I am from Canada and in case you are wondering, a month of counselling costs $420 CAD. Which is extremely, extremely expensive considering that NO benefits will cover that since all the therapists are located in the US. For that price, I was seriously hoping to get amazing therapists. First thing first, they automatically match you with someone that has experience with super broad things such as "family issues" or "depression". You actually can't select anything specific such as narcissists (in my case). I believe that many people are dealing with narcissists in their lives so you would assume that many therapists on BH have some experience with that. Well...no. I was matched to many therapists that literally had NO experience with narcissists and couldn't help me. In fact, some even asked me to switch to another counsellor. Which is more than fine! (At least, those therapists were honest) But you will also get a lot of therapists that won't even ask you specific questions and will take FOREVER to respond. 3 or 4 days is unacceptable. If you can't respond to clients at least daily (and that's what they are supposed to do!) then don't be on the platform! Can you imagine paying $420 a month and having someone responding every 3-4 days? And when they do respond, most of them just send SUPER generic messages. I even got one sending me a "." YES. Probably because the BH bot reminds them to respond otherwise and probably puts a penalty of some sort. So I share super personal things about myself and my struggles and I am getting a "." After a week or so, you just realize that waiting for a therapist to respond is just so ridiculous that you hit the "change therapist" button. After some time and a bunch of therapists, you'll be able to select your therapist. But same, their blurbs are usually extremely broad and it's close to impossible to know if they will be able to help you. So you just select one and hope for the best. Again, there is absolutely no way to select specific issues or types of therapy if you are already familiar with that. After talking to (no joke) probably 20+ therapists (more like waiting for them to respond and automatically changing counsellors while waiting for their response) I only found one that really helped me. However, when I came back after a month hiatus, she would barely acknowledge me. I ended up also talking to a therapist that was almost rude telling me “I don’t know what type of help you are looking for and you are way too generic” even though I had filled out her very lengthy form 3 days prior + sent a couple messages that I thought would help her understand my issues. After she finally asked specific questions, I shared some extremely personal stories and she told me she would send me some goals for next time. She didn’t say anything about what I had just told her and we spoke for less than 30 min! (And she was late to start with) Just FYI many therapists do offer a free 30-min consultation over the phone these days to see if you are a good match. So paying $420 a month for a 30-min session a week is absolutely outrageous. On the other hand, support is absolutely amazing and they did offer me 3 weeks of free counselling because of my bad experience. I am sure it can probably help a lot of people but not the ones who are used to therapy. You are better off looking for someone on your own.

The "concept" of Better Help is good. But, I gave it three chance and ultimately struck out. I was either berated and dropped for speaking plain, felt marginalized because of my opposing political leanings, or just wasn't communicated with sufficiently enough. The support via "contact us" did what they could but "Better Help" needs better help, and better, more open minded, less political comparisons, and more psychological focus that actually communicate at a level commensurate with expectations that should be realistically, and specifically spelled out instantly.

Wow. Words can't describe my disappointment. After jumping through all the various hoops to make an account and hearing such great things I am left with mediocre counseling at its best. 2 Stars for cluttered interface and less than stellar service. :(