There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. We talked about the mental health services apps Better Help on the News round Up the other week, which was in the news because the Federal Trade Commissions as the company shared people's personal responses to very personal questions with Facebook and Snapchat, even after their sketchy terms of service said they wouldn't
do that. Better Help spokespeople did not admit wrongdoings of Pride surprise, but they did have to pay out seven point eight million dollars to about a million people who use their services, including Better Help, but also their apps aimed at specific groups like Pride Counseling for lgbtqu users or Team Counseling for youth, and they did agree to stop doing this, so Betterhelp had to pay out an insulting nine dollars and seventy two cents for sharing vulnerable
people's sensitive information. Listen, we have been a little bit suss about Betterhelp for a while, and for me it all reached a fever pitch back in twenty twenty one after the astro World crowd crush incident in Texas where ten people, some of whom were children, died. The organizers announced a partnership with Better Help to provide mental health services to the survivors, which just rubbed me the wrong way.
So producer Mike and I spoke to doctor Jeff Gunther aka Therapy Jeff, one of TikTok's most trusted therapists, to dig into why ten people died, including three children, and hundreds more were injured at rapper Travis Scott's Astroworld music
festival in Houston, Texas. First Hand video footage on social media shows young people pleading with crew members to stop the performance because people in the crowd were unresponsive, but authorities say Travis Scott continued to perform for thirty seven minutes after Houston police firefighters were called to what had been deemed a mass casualty event. Travis Scott even brought out rapper Drake for a guest appearance as many in
the crowd screamed for help. It's not clear if Travis Scott knew the severity of the situation, but Scott does have a history of inciting crowds into dangerous behavior at his concerts. He's even faced charges for it at past concerts and Live Nation. The company behind Astro World has a long history of safety violations. Now the footage coming out of the event is horrifying, and because of Travis Scott's fan base, this was happening to very young people kids.
I was getting winded, I was using all the energy I had left to me, and I came to the point where I was accepting my death. In a statement, Travis Scott says he didn't know people had died until
after he'd left his stage. He also announced what he called a partnership with the therapy app Better Help to provide a free month of therapy to those impacted by the tragedy, which on its face may sound great, but Better Help has also been called out for its murky policies regarding how they use the data of clients and
how they treat mental health services in general. Not to be clear, I am not an expert on digital health services, but doctor Michael Lomato, our show's producer and chief science officer, is Michael was a psychologist who does research on digital health interventions. Any lead the data team that supports digital products,
which has helped hundreds of thousands of people overcome addiction. Mike, can I sit down with Jeff Gunther, a therapist who runs therapy Den, a resource to match people with diverse therapists, who uses this platform on TikTok to warn people that apps like Betterhelp might not be as good as they seem.
I am Jeff Gunther, licensed professional counselor.
So, Jeff, you run a resource called the therapy Den. How did this resource come to be?
Yeah, so, I'm in a therapist of practice therapists. Since two thousand and five, I started a local therapist directory in Portland, that's where I live. And the Portland Therapist Directory grew and I learned about what therapists are wanting or what clients are wanting when they're looking for a therapist. Then, back like three or four years ago, I used all that knowledge to launch therapy den dot com and it was sort of like meant to counter another huge therapist directory,
Psychology Today. Psychology Today. You might be aware of their magazine. You'll find Psychology Today's magazines like in all of the therapist waiting rooms. One of the things I don't like about their magazine is that basically over the like many many decades that they've been producing their magazine, they primarily only have very good looking people on the cover, very skinny women that are predominantly white, So there's no diversity
on their magazine cover. And that transfers over to their therapist directory, which is sort of like always rankings number one on Google, so they you can't go to psychology today and find a therapist that is competently trained in racial justice, or that is competently trained in treating transgender people, or for the longest time, you couldn't search therapist by gender,
and they only had male and female gender. So there was like I made therapy the Therapy then directory to kind of like challenge them and force them or encourage them to evolve. And psychology today has been slowly kind of evolving. I don't think that they totally meet the needs of modern clients, but they're doing something about it,
and I'm happy about that. So Therapy den was sort of like, all right, I'm going to try to create this disruptive force in the therapist directory field, which isn't very big, and so that was the main agenda and then we can get into it. But like back in twenty fifteen, when like better Help and talks space started to become a thing, I was like, oh, okay, like they're somebody I need to target as well.
I know, when I was first looking for a therapist a few years ago, I knew that I wanted a black woman. And that's partially because I had heard from my black girlfriends of these awful experiences of having to spend their time in therapy, you know, educating their white therapist about things like systemic racism. And I knew that I didn't want to do that, but finding a black woman therapist for me was incredibly difficult. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.
Yeah exactly. That isn't how therapy should be. Like you should not be spending time that you're paying for to educate your client or educate your therapist on who you are, your culture, your background, the language that you use, where you're coming from. You know, your religion, and your ethnicity.
So that's why therapy then was created so that we can like create like a ton of filters so that you can like figure out how you can find a therapist that already matches with you in lots of different ways. And also I've like taken a stance on like, here are a ton of different questions that clients should be asking their therapist in the first session. If you're black and you're seeing a therapist that's white, you need to ask that that therapist like what makes you How can
you competently treat me? What do you know about my ethnicity? How do you feel when if I'm going to talk about how racist white people are, Like what do you think about you know, the black lives matters, and like all the protests and like there's just like hundreds of questions that you could ask your therapist to make sure
that they are a good fit for you. And I don't think that a lot of clients know that they can like interview their therapist on that first session and ask that therapist tell me, like the specific training that you've received, talk to me about like the supervisors and the consultation groups that you're in. So I know that, so that I know that you can competently treat me. So that's a whole thing.
Yeah. I love that you're giving clients and just people the like empowering them with a language and tools to advocate for themselves. I love that so you talked about your relationship with these therapy apps that have really become ubiquitous in the last few years, things like better Help and talk Space. You know, when I first heard about these apps, they did really seem like an accessible way for folks to access like therapists. But so many therapists
I've heard from do not like these apps. Can you tell me why that is?
Yeah, but let's start there. Like, you're right, the accessibility that these apps have like tapped into it is so incredibly difficult, and I wish it wasn't. It's a systemic issue, but it's so incredibly difficult for somebody to just like find a therapist it's a good match for them. There's a ton of searching that you have to do. There's confusing insurance that you have to like wade through. It
can be expensive, there's like a ton of roadblocks. So many therapists are booked, especially because everybody in the fun and world decided to get therapy at the same goddamn time, which is totally fine. I get it. I understand. I love that you're getting therapy, but therapists are so busy, so you're just like you even if you find a therapist who is a good match. It's incredibly frustrating because
they might not have any openings. But then betterhelp Talkspace, Cerebral other apps like that have come along and they're just like, hey, click a button, we are the uber of therapy. Download the app, click this button, check the terms of service, don't worry about reading it. It's confusing anyways, and we will set you up with a therapist, just any therapist. Is it a good match? I don't know.
We hope so maybe. But like they've tapped into the accessibility part where it's just like it's so understandable, Like people are getting so frustrated, so of course they're going to go to these apps, especially like younger people that are used to doing that.
Yeah, that is an excellent point that they really did identif by a true need that exists out there. Of it's difficult to find a therapist. And we talk a lot on this show about bad things that the internet and tech bring to us, but I was talking with
bridget the other day. One of the things she mentioned was how her favorite stories are about the great things that the internet does to like bring people together or help somebody be seen or find whatever it is that they're looking for, and it really seems like they sort of zeroed in on that and it is a real need that they've addressed it is.
It's a real need. And on the platforms there are actually amazing therapists, Like my beef is not what the therapists that are contracted to provide therapy. They are like trained to you know, end licensed and they're they're great. So yeah, they tap into a need and somebody needed to do it. And it's because like because therapists and
private practice cannot all get their shit together. We're all running our own little individual small businesses, so we can't all come together and like figure out how to solve this problem. It's not just therapists are being to come together. It's just like so many layers of everything that needs to come together in order to fix this. So these tech companies, which are super savvy, they're the ones that did it. So bravo, I hate you.
You compared these apps to Uber, and you know it's one of those things like should getting a therapist, should starting the journey to like deal with your trauma, unpack your issues? Should that look like an Uber business model that we know has so much exploitation, whether it's the exploitation of drivers, the exploitation of writer details and writer privacy. Should should that relationship mimic uber and I would argue, no,
it shouldn't. That accessibility is good. The idea of having a therapist at your fingertips sounds great, but when you actually think of at it harder, you're like, wait, should therapy be the same be a similar kind of business framework as something like an uber where you can get a ride at the push of a button. And maybe this driver isn't being treated well and maybe they aren't being super careful with my data. Who knows, I don't know.
The answers might be buried in the third page of some you know, murky privacy documents somewhere, like I'm not really sure. Should getting into a relationship with a therapist really be the same way that it is when you just like hail a taxi to your home?
Yeah? I mean no, I think not at all, because, like, you know, if someone's driving you from the restaurant to your home, Like, I don't know, I guess that person can kind of be anybody as long as they're like good enough, you know, they're not going to bother you. They're going to like be quiet whatever, they'll they'll do what they need to do to get you from like point A to point B. But when you're looking for a therapist, it's not just like are they good enough?
Are they going to like talk to you or listen? It's like are they actually qualified to treat you? Do they understand on your experience in a like deep way? And you need to shop around for therapists and talk to multiple therapists in order to find somebody who's a good enough match. And instead of just being handed one like Uber would do, or like talk space or better
help does so. No, I don't think so, but there are apps and tech companies that like understand that Betterhelp is not doing this well and somebody else needs to do it better. So there is like a newer app that's I think is maybe just in like Florida or Georgia right now, called Hurdle. Have you ever heard of Hurdle? No, yeah, it's I just heard about it. And they contacted me
to like let me know about what they're doing. And they contacted me because they're like, hey, can you sponsor us on TikTok and I said no, but only because it sort of like conflicts with therapy done where I'm
trying to connect people. So it's anyways, I love them and what they're doing, what they've started out doing where they're like paying therapists, Well we should talk about that with Better Help, because they're not and they're like making sure that all the therapists on the platform are competently trained in racial justice and social justice and they're transcompetent and queer competent, and they're continuously going through trainings and
so like they're doing it the right way. So there are apps and services out there that are starting to do it the right way. But Better Help and Talk Space they're like these first movers that have amazing marketing, especially Better Help and and yeah, so's it might be hard to compete with them.
It's interesting that you say that they have better marketing, you know, because I've looked at your tiktoks and I think one of the big criticisms is how they harvest
people's data and use it for marketing and advertising. And uh, you know, I clicked through I read their privacy form and yeah, they're just using all of your data, including your communications with your counselor for third party marketing, and so it made me wonder, like how much of their business model is actual therapy delivery and how much are they an advertising company?
Exactly? Yes, they get so much amazing personal data on your mental health information, who you are, when was your you know, are you suicidal, when was your last suicide attempt? How much money do you make? Uh, where do you live, what are your pronouns? What's your sexual orientation? Uh, what's your gender? Like there's They get the most detailed information about how much, how often you're talking to your therapist, if you're meeting your therapist goal, if you're married, counseling goals,
like so much stuff incredibly valuable. I don't know like how much money they make off of it, or if they make any money off it, if they're making all of their money off of that, but they that information is incredibly valuable, and they did. They were a little bit more clear a few months ago when I made one of my first TikTok videos about them and going through their privacy policy about like all the information that
they collect. Since I sort of like exposed them and it got, you know, over a million views of their like privacy policy, and they've changed their privacy policy to make it so much more vague and so much more confusing and actually gives them so much more leeway when it comes to like sharing your data. They can share your data with their corporate partners. Do you know who their corporate partners are? Fuck? No, who the fuck knows? I have no idea. They don't list them. They can
share it with their ad network. You know who's in their ad network? I have no fucking idea. Probably a ton of people. They can. They can use it for marketing purposes and whatever the hell they want to use it for. So we don't know why, what they're using for exactly, We don't know who they're sharing it with, we don't know how much money they're making off of it. And the only way that you can use their app is if you check off the terms of service, which
like allows them to use all this information. I would love it if they gave you an option to not like sell your data on my HBO Mac subscription. There's a little checkbox that says, are we allowed? Can we like use your third party data? And I can just be like, nope, better help doesn't do that And why would they ever do it because they're probably making a ton of money.
Something else that I'd like to mention is that you know they're able to sell your information to third parties, and so if they sold your information to a company like Facebook, then you think about all the different data that we know that Facebook is able to collect, combined with whatever they have from your your relationship with your counselor through better help, it becomes clearer. Just like we're
not talking about little bits and pieces of data. They really can and mine and harvest a real composite like portrait of who you are and sell that for profit. And I just fundamentally believe that that is not how a relationship with a mental health specialist should look. And to me, there is not another word for that other than like exploitation. And like I guess, I really see it as this kind of capitalistic mining of the most sensitive stuff about us so that corporate interests can get
better pockets. And it's just so depressing and demoralizing.
Oh god, it is, it really is.
Let's take a quick break er back. So you might be thinking, what about HIPPA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a law that created national standards to protect patient health information from being disclosed without consent. Doesn't HIPPA prevent our health information from being used to sell things? In this case, the answer is not really. Our producer Mike works with health information, and that means he spends a lot of time dealing with hippap Here's what he had to say.
I work within the constraints of HIPPA every day, and I think it's probably one of the most misunderstood laws in America. People think HIPPA protects all of their health information all of the time, but it doesn't. HIPPA only applies to a very narrow set of actors and circumstances. Basically, it applies to healthcare providers and their contractors. Better Health is neither of those things. In a page on their website convincingly titled online therapy Services, are they legit question mark,
they repeatedly use phrases like HIPPA compliant therapists. What they don't say is that the therapists are bound by HIPPA because they're providing healthcare. But better Health the platform is not. Because they aren't providing healthcare. They're simply connecting you with the providers and so they are bound only by the
terms of service by creating an account. HIPPO was signed into law in nineteen ninety six, around the same time Bill Clinton was describing the Internet as an information super highway. It's authors never imagined all the ways the Internet would revolutionize how we access healthcare. And so we've come to this place where most Americans believe their private health information
is legally protected, but that's just not always true. In reality, many of the digital services we use have no greater legal obligation to protect information about our health than information about what TV shows we like to watch or what types of sneakers we want to buy. So the question is, are we okay with for profit tech companies like betterhelp setting the precedent around privacy and digital health services because that's where we're at.
And one of the questions that I get all the time, Yeah, because you're right, they know you intimately, like so many things about you. And the question I get is like, how is this not a hip of violation? What is making this okay? So if you are my client and you're seeing me in my private practice, I'm your therapist, all the notes that I write on you is actually your property. That's all yours. You can go to your therapist. You can be like, give me my notes, and a
therapist legally has to hand that over to you. That's all of your medical information we need to give it. So if my client came in and was like, Jeff, give me all of the notes that you've been keeping on me, and I give it over to them, they could take all of those all that mental health information, and they could sell it to an advertiser. They can give it to Facebook. As a client, you can do whatever you want with your medical information. And that's what's happening.
When you sign up for Better Help. You're saying, Okay, all of the information that I'm providing to this therapist is mine, and now I'm giving it to you Better Help. You can do whatever you want with it. So that's another way that they're able to get around it. And so one of my big things was like, oh, you know, I can fuck over Better Help if I can like go to the state licensing boards in all of the states.
I'd start with like California and New York and be like, Okay, y'all therapists are seeing these clients and they know that the client information that we like ethically legally have to keep confidential is being given to Better Help and given to like advertisers. Should these therapists be allowed to provide therapy on Better Help? Should these therapists be disciplined or have their license taken away? Not that I want to get those licenses taken away, but maybe I can put
pressure on Better Help. And the problem is is that like what I just mentioned, it's the client information and they can hand it over. There also is somebody something in Hippa where like Hippo's just like everything has to say confidential unless maybe it's used for marketing purposes and it's anonymoused, so like they also have that like gray area. There's so many things that are detecting Better Help.
It seems though that like stepping back to harvest all of this personal information about somebody's mental health and then use it to make advertising revenue, it just feels.
Wrong, right, like oh there's that. Yeah, it just doesn't sit well. It just doesn't feel okay. That shouldn't be happening obviously, like abows your therapistness, anonymizing your info and selling it to advertisers. I would lose my license and I should that just shouldn't be a part of the therapy process. But we're in this like funky, weird, shitty capitalist whatever time where like that's okay, and they're incredibly protected and they're going to probably continue to do that.
And betterhelp is you know, they interacted with me a little bit by like leaving some comments on some of my TikTok videos, and now they have there just ignoring me, which is probably a very good business decision on their because like, who the fuck am I?
I mean, you did like your tiktoks had an impact when you were describing how they changed their you know, their privacy policy. For a hot second, I thought you were going to say they saw, you know, because of my tiktoks that got millions of views and they changed their privacy policy for the better. But then it was like, oh, they just made it even more vague.
No, because of me, I made it worse for everybody by like pointing this out. They're just like, cool, we need to be real fucking shady now, So you're welcome, America.
When I saw the news out of Texas, it had a really deep impact on me in a way that I almost can't even articulate why. There was something about the videos that were coming out of it that just really hit me in a way that you know, you think that you're desensitized to tragedy and disaster, but something
about those videos really stuck with me. And I think seeing like the live stream with an Apple logo on it, where I knew that young people were facing really scary circumstances, I really can't shake the deep disturbed way that that how disturbing that was to me, Like I don't know why I've not been able to sort of like move
past it, but I have not. And when I woke up again and saw that Travis Scott was partnering with Better Help, that really it just seemed like a cherry on top of this exploitation cake where these young people had really been deeply exploited in the deepest, deepest ways for profit, to make money for corporate interest, whether we're talking about Live Nation, Travis Scott, the organizer's Apple streaming platforms, whatever, and then in the aftermath of that horrific traumatic tragedy,
what they were being offered was just another way to serve them up to be further mined and exploited and it was like it broke my brain. I couldn't even conceptualize the debts to how broken so many systems are where that's the thing they're being offered and even still one month of it, so it's like it's already shitty what they're being offered. But it's not even that long. Some of these kids probably have like complex PTSD. It
takes longer than a month to treat that. What were your thoughts on that partnership?
Yeah, garbage. I thought it was a dumpster fire. I thought it was. I felt the same way that you felt. So, yeah, it's like a bunch of you know, corporations creating trauma and then sending those traumatized kids to Better Help where they're going to like mine their data and make a
ton of money. It's it was disturbing, it was upsetting, and it reminded me of when Better Help used to I still think they kind of do this, but back in like twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, they were going to all the therapist directories out there that attract, you know, the clients that are looking for therapists, and they're just trying to like either buy them up or quote unquote partner with them in order to like take all of their business and like direct those those users into the
Better Help ecosystem. And so they approached me when I like launched therapy then and they're like, hey, can we go ahead and take like therapist profiles and add them to your directory so that if any of the people that are using your directory that you know, find they could like find one of our Better Help therapists and then create services or create you know, start therapy with them.
And every time somebody signs up for Better Help through therapy, then will pay you three hundred dollars, which is a ton of money. And because they're like, you could potentially make eighty thousand dollars a month because we've like made had this deal, created this deal with other therapist directories
that are the same size as yours. And I know those therapist directories and I know the owners and some of them are buddies of mine, So I was like talking to them about like what went on, and those therapist directories were like basically taken over and just used as like a funnel in order to like you know, get even more people to sign up for Better Help.
So you don't really own your therapist directory anymore. They just sort of like take it over because they put thousands and thousands twenty thousand different like therapist profiles or something like on on your directory. And it's also like therapy done is about like matching people with like a good competent therapist that you know is a good fit, and Better Help can't do that at all. It's a therapy mel So it didn't feel okay, it allow would lose control, Like it just didn't feel like a good
match at all. And I like started to That's when I started to like really learn about their privacy policy and the data mining and shit like that. And I would imagine that like all the marketing that they do that Better Help does, and all the podcasts and NPR and shit like that, all of those companies are probably getting like a very nice kickback because Betterhelp was like, Hey, on average, we make twelve hundred dollars, we bring in
twelve hundred dollars. When somebody who signs up for Better Help, we are very much willing to like pay you three hundred dollars when we collect twelve hundred dollars. Also, we're going to pay the therapist. Shit so like it's not even like we have like too much of an overhead cost.
You talk about how the therapists are just not only are they not paid what like like a comparable amount that they can make in private practice or elsewhere, but also you know they're I learned from your tiktoks they're sometimes paid by the word, and so once they hit their work out, they kind of have to decide if they want to continue treating a client who very well, maybe in crisis, basically out of the goodness of their
heart because they care about this client. For free, clients can access their therapists twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, which sounds really good in theory. But then you're like, should you have access to a therapist twenty four to seven I would say no, that maybe you should have some boundaries around how you access your therapist.
It's kind of stunning to hear about how much money they must be taking in via how much money gets spent gets given to their actual therapists who are doing the work of the stating this platform.
Yeah, one, I mean that the therapists are getting maybe around thirty a little less than thirty dollars an hour Ideally, if you're a therapist and you're seeing clients who want to get at least one hundred dollars an hour, that's what we're aiming for, if not more if you live in more expensive cities. But but our help is like, we will pay you up to fifty dollars an hour if you work more hours per week. So if you work up to fifty hours a week, you'll get our
top pay, which is fucking bonkers. I don't even understand why that's a pay scale that exists. Like, work fifteen hours, get thirty dollars or less an hour, work up to fifty hours a week more, I don't know. That's the whole fucking thing. I hate that. And then it's they pay you based on word count, so you can't go over the word count that they like provide if you do start like providing more support, if you start texting more support and going over the word count, you're working
for fucking free therapists. They're not going to pay you for it. So maybe they're paying you thirty dollars an hour, but it's actually a lot less if you like feel like you need to give even more support to that client, and of course, just like uber and Lyft or whatever, like you're not getting benefits. You're a contract. You're not like getting paid time off, you know, like you have
to provide all of your equipment, you know. So it's just like it's a bunch of bullshit that therapists are getting exploited, and they're able to exploit these therapists that are usually like fresh out of grad school or just looking for a little part time work or something, And yeah, twenty four hour access to a therapist clinically no, not okay, that's not creating self reliance. You need to be able to kind of like go and do your thing and
then be able to check back with your therapist. I understand why that's appealing though, but imagine under stand that that therapist with a caseload of like ten twenty thirty, forty fifty clients a week, You're they're getting pinged all the fucking time. So there's no way that a therapist is able. But like a therapist must have to it's in their contract that they have to respond within twenty four hours, no matter what day or time it is,
which is not very realistic. Plus there's this like thing where like if there's if betterhelp has like a flood of people signing up, They're like, Okay, I know that you have a ton of clients, but will you take these new clients? Will pay you more for these new clients, which sort of incentivizes therapists to drop their old clients that they're not getting paid enough for in the first place, to then take the new clients. It's such a stupid, fucked up system. I hate it. Can you tell?
It's so fucked up? And this is not how therapy is meant to be. This is not how it should look to access mental health care. And you know, in the wake of the astront World thing, it's like it is a it's an exploitation layer cake where the clients, the potential clients, are going to be exploited, the therapists running the side are being exploited. Everybody's being exploited except for the tech overlords who like are possibly like making
money from the people that are being referred from this tragedy. Honestly, talking to you has helped me make sense of why it made me so deeply, deeply angry and disgusted, like I had such a visceral reaction. Also just the use of the word partnership, like, you know, using this tragedy as a branding opportunity. I really found it deeply, deeply, like just disgusting, and I think talking to you is really made it so clear that yeah, that wasn't that
was it. I was almost about to say, like an irrational response, that was a rational response, because it is really fucked up, but it is really disgusting.
Yeah, it's a very rational response to a very irrational thing that's occurring.
Totally, You've described all these numbers of like caseloads of forty or fifty patients a wee, Which like, what a joke. How can you be providing like high quality of care. I haven't heard you say anything about like the evaluation process or you know, any sort of quality controlled do you know if they do, Like I just have to imagine that the quality of care that patients are receiving is pretty low with a caseload like that. But is that something that they look at or measure or talk about.
Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I've never come across any sort of like data or survey about the quality of care, So I don't know, And I just feel I feel bad for everybody involved. I feel really bad for the therapists that are getting burnt out, that are kind of like forced to work longer or more hours. And this is I don't know, I don't know if I can say that, Well whatever, maybe we'll head it out. But there's can you say that if
you want to. You're somebody that's seeing a better help therapist and you really like like your therapist, because there's a ton of really great therapists on there, and this conversation is upsetting or disturbing you. If you wanted to ask your better help therapist, if they have their own private practice and they are accepting clients, then that's something you can ask them and you can talk to them about. The better help therapists obviously are not allowed to be
like out of private practice. If you want to see me there and you know, even pay me, if you like, pay that therapist the same amount that you're giving better help, then what their hourly rate has doubled or tripled, you know by that time. So so, because I get a lot of feedback like, oh but I love my better help therapist. Let stick with that better help therapist. I'm so happy for you. Also, maybe you can see them in their private practice and get out of like better
Help if you want to. I think I can say that. I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, I think that's good if vice, because it sounds like you're being so clear that you're not trying to say that better Help doesn't have great, kick ass therapists on the platform, but that the platform itself does not support these therapists to giving the best quality of care that they can, and so there might be other ways to access that same therapist that you might love who's on Better Help in a way where they're not being sort of set up to give you not as good
of care as you could be getting otherwise.
Right exactly, And your therapists in their private practice probably won't sell all your personal mental health information.
Most likely they are not going to do that.
More after a quick break, let's get right back into it now. I'm not the only one who has a problem with Better Helps partnership with Travis Scott. In the wake of the Astro World tragedy. The response has not been good, and Betterhelp is working overtime to correct what they're calling misinformation about their platform. Now, it's worth noting that Better Help waited until the partnership got negative reactions online to clarify pretty basic details about the arrangement, frankly,
making patient protection seem like kind of an afterthought. They released an FAQ where they say that people who use the free month of Better Help services will not be billed after that month is up, and they say that Travis Scott isn't making any money from the partnership. Now, I've heard a lot of tech company corporate devil speaking my day, and I'd like the company to clarify whether this also pertains to any business or philanthropic entities Travis
Scott might be affiliated with. They also answer the frequently asked question, is information members enter on Betterhealth ever sold to advertising platforms or third parties? Now they answer this
with an emphatic no. Period. That can't be the whole story because on their own privacy policy, in the section called purposes for which information is used, they say your information may be used to quote personalized website experience, including targeted offers and ads throughout our websites, third party sites, and via email or text message. They also say quote, we may share your information with any subsidiaries or parent
companies within our corporate group. So who are these other companies in their corporate group and what products are being advertised? Is Better Health using your personal mental information to buy ads or sell ads? Why rely on such vague language when discussing something as important as our health and privacy?
I believe Better Health is intentionally exploiting vague language and gray areas and their privacy policies to mislead the public, which under normal circumstances is bad, but it's especially egregious to do that after a tragedy. Do you feel like the public it's owed a little bit of transparency about this partnership. I feel like, especially given that the folks who were at that festival are like a lot of
them are young people. I feel like it is a public like a public good for Better Help and or Travis Scott to say, hey, we're doing this therapy, this therapy partnership for folks who were impacted by this tragedy. Here's who's making money on it, Here's how your data is going to be used. You know here, like whether Travis Scott, Better Help or both are making some sort of like cut or kickback. Do you feel like it's in the public interest for us to have that information in a transparent way.
Oh my god. Yes, And like in my most recent TikTok video that's on Twitter and everywhere else, I'm saying that, like what's going on, Like, let's be clear here who's getting paid? Uh do how do you continue care after that one month? How much is it going to cost in order to like continue? Like there, it's just also murky. So yeah, I would love if there's more transparency around.
But the way that better help operates is just like they're very good at like making shit real vague, and unfortunately, whenever I push against them, or anyone pushes up against them, they just get even more vague and more vague and get into that gray area. So hopefully this will like get more people to become concerned and ask them to be more transparent about what they're doing and the deal that's being set up.
Travis Scott, Yeah, I just feel like we're in this age where things that technology that is meant to be like a wellness focused thing or a mental health focused thing, we're in this weird gray area where everything feels kind of scammy and like not really regulated, and so we have all of these apps that are sort of mental health ish or like wellness ish or like medical care ish, and you just have to add, like are these regulated? Are they safe? Am I actually getting good information from
like a competent trained medical health professional. I wonder, like, do you feel the same way that we're in this sort of wild West where there are so many tech platforms offering us wellness or you know, medical care, but in this very gray area way where they can sort of avoid having to answer some of these questions about you know, the quality of care that you're actually getting.
Oh yeah, for sure. And they're so savvy, they're so slick, they know exactly what they're doing, so you just kind of like give this like these ish services and it works well enough. And also you know all these like podcasts or MPR whoever, like it's such a good look for them. I'm like, oh, therapy, you know, like it looks like there. It's so nice to quot unquote partner with them because it sort of like lifts their brand up.
You know, so it's just like this feel good, lovely thing, but we don't know what's going on like right behind the scenes, and MPR, fuck you, MPR. They're like I hate that MPR. It's like running ads all over the place. I mean it's all over Oregon with like NPR and OPB over here where there's just I'm constantly hearing Better Help and I'm emailing NPR and Oregon Public Procects. I'm like letting them know, like I want to be on
your show. This is not okay. If you understood the values of this company, you would have a fucking aneurysm about it. But like they're not responding to me and they're not doing anything about it. So it's this weird like halo effect that happens when they do partner with these Better Help and like, yeah, no, yeah, I don't know, I'm agreeing with everything that you're saying, so yeah, yeah, And it's.
I mean, you've said a mouthful. And I know in the podcast space specifically that Better Help has a It's like one of those ubiquitous brands that you hear if you listen to podcasts, you've definitely heard of Better Help ad. And I have, you know, friends and colleagues who I'm
sure do Better Help ads. And I'm not trying to like call anybody out, but I also feel like you have to take a little bit of responsibility for the cop for like not so it's not just a financial arrangement where they pay you and you read the ad.
But if you sound like you're endorsing their their values and endorsing their practices, and if you're using your like MPR voice to make this service seem really good and progressive and like a good like a good idea, like I do think we have to step back and ask some hard questions of ourselves about whether or not we're allowing brands whose values do not align with our own to be kind of brandwa washed by our like you know, slick podcaster voice or you know, or be like the
relationship that podcast listeners have with the with their hosts right like I feel like it like it exploits the connection that listeners have with their favorite podcast host to make these to make brands that are not so good seem like they're actually aligned with their values.
I guess mm hmm, you said it totally. I keep on saying it. But like Betterhelp one of the best marketing teams I've ever seen. They're so good and they know exactly when to turn off their comments on TikTok videos because like they are, Oh, they're totally fucking off because like all the TikTokers are just like, whoa, we don't like this. This isn't like thank you Jeff for like being transparent and like like explaining their privacy policy.
We're going to spam all their TikTok videos and you can't. They block everybody, like they know how to turn all that shit off. So yeah, I think podcasters and everyone with their NPR voices like really need to think about And also, like I guarantee all these podcasters are not getting their therapy through better help, Like no way are they actually doing that. So yeah, I agree.
It's interesting you mentioned the you know, the halo effect there, and you know this moment that we're in where there are all these potentially scammy ish mental health services and it's like mental health it's only sort of recently become a thing that we all are talking about and acknowledging as like something that needs to be dealt with, but
it's still like a very private personal thing. And I wonder if that like contributes to the viability of scams like this what you know, maybe it's a scam, maybe it's not. But like when an actor is going to participate in delivering mental health services but not respect that like privacy piece of it and just you know, completely violate those norms in pursuit of profit. It's a pretty dangerous tech enabled place.
One of the good things is that it's sort of like breaking its mental health stigma is is like reducing So that's also one of the things that's like a good thing that's happening. But at what cost because there's like so much information and data sharing and like ads
being directed more towards you because of this. So like yay for accessibility, yay for like the stigmatization, but like this is like profiting these huge tech companies so much, and it's so upsetting and it's so disturbing, and we need to talk even more about it.
H Well, I mean so we we we don't fuck with better health, but as we know, like it can be so hard to get accessed to with therapists, So like, what are some alternatives to services like better Health that might be a little less scammy, uh and exploited it If folks out there want to access mental health services but don't know where to start.
I mean, I'm biased, but I love therapyn dot com. Uh. Start there. There's another therapist directory that I am in love with, Inclusive Therapists dot com. Uh the same sort of vibe and mission and values as therapy den dot com. The thing is is, like you kind of have to be okay or understand accepting of the fact that, like this is going to be a journey for you. Finding
a therapist is going to take some time. And the reason it's going to take time is because you need to find somebody who's a really good match and who can competently treat you. So you're gonna have to like interview three, four, five, ten therapists possibly to like find somebody who's a good match for you. It's grueling and
it sucks and I don't like it. But starting a therapy don dot com, Inclusive therapist dot com even just like googling somebody you know, like trying or going to Psychology Today dot com to like go through their therapist directory, find a therapist that's in private practice. You'll like the quality of care is through the roof compared to the quality of care that you get from betterhelp, just because the way the betterhelp is like set up, So have
some patients. Really educate yourself. Ask all of the questions that you want, like how can you compident competently train me? What's your background? But also like if you want, you can be like are you married? Do you have kids? Are you from this city? Where do you hang out? What? What do you think about? Like who's your favorite sports team? Do you garden? Whatever the fuck you want? Like are
you like ask all the questions. Therapists don't have to answer all these questions, but I want you to ask all the questions that will make you feel more comfortable talking to that therapist. Ask them like do you diagnose? What do you think my diagnosis might be? What is treatment going to look?
Like?
Are you cool? Whatever you need to do? So you need to start therapyded dot com wherever the hell you want to start, and then understand that you have to like go on a journey.
Honestly, if it was not for your tikto, I would not have known any of this, Like, I don't think there's a lot of resources out there to help people understand companies or platforms like betterhealth and so I'm so I'm so glad that you're making the content that you are because I think that you're helping people take ownership over there, or you're empowering people to advocate for themselves and take ownership over how they access these services. And
so I'm so grateful for you. Where can folks keep up with you?
Yeah, so you can look for search for Therapy then on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram. I am also I produce a podcast called Swoon Love Lessons with Julian Gina. So Julian Gina are sex therapists and experts and every now and then I'll hop on and be on a podcast episode with them. So you can find me there talking like given love advice. I'm an amazing at giving love advice. So so that's where you can find me, and you can personally email me at Hello at therapy dot com if you have any questions.
The Astra World disaster has turned into a hotbed of conspiracy theories. In our next episode, we'll hear from researcher Abby Richards about why this tragedy has resulted in satanic panic on social media platforms like TikTok. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Tood. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A love bell lived, a long love and well lived.