Is Online Therapy A Scam?

Danielle Carr, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, joins Emma to discuss mental health. The need for mental health treatment skyrockets during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rules changed allowing patients to get mental health medications easier to allow people to stay home and not be exposed to the virus. Online therapy outfits like BetterHelp stepped in. But was the treatment on these apps as good as traditional therapy?

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Can you expand on The Better Help and the kind of explosion of these kinds of apps and quick fixes for mental health that I would imagine quite profitable for some of these startups? But does this have the same level of oversight that traditional doctor-patient relationships have? Like how have they been able to exploit this as a Marketplace? Because it seems quite dicey. Well, I'm glad to have the chance to talk about this. Because I think a lot of people don't realize this is happening. There was some coverage of cerebral specifically by The Wall Street Journal. And I want to say there was an investigative report by Bloomberg. But it didn't get as much of a press cycle as I thought it would. And of course, cerebral is not the only company doing this. They were just the most egregious. So one of the things that happened during covid of course there had already been telepsychiatry but the kind of sea change in the market had not yet happened. During covid the rule mandating that you have to see your provider in person at least once to get the prescription for schedule two medication so we're talking Adderall we're talking a bunch of Controlled Substances right. That rule was lifted for obvious reasons. but this is why there was suddenly this kind of we were all getting ads that were like do you want Adderall? You can basically have some. right on Instagram? and of course, there are these that are extremely profitable these are also it's not totally clear what forms of data these apps are collecting on us. So for instance Better Help is currently a class action lawsuit against Better Help because of the very poor privacy protections that were in place for what is, you know, an important medical encounter. And so there's a movement right now as you can imagine from these companies to lobby for instance to keep the rules that were instant for covid in place. Because a great deal of The Profit model depends on those loopholes. I think people should think very seriously about that. but so there's so like that's wrong right? We know that's wrong. But in another sense maybe even more Global sense and this is not to indict any of the very hard-working and well-meaning and often heroic medical providers who are working on these platforms albeit in an increasingly kind of gig economy model. Which results in you knowing degradations and quality of care. This is not to indict them at all. But just to say it's not totally clear that this is the type of thing that is going to really make a serious difference with population levels of mental and emotional distress.