The existence of Betterhelp doesn't make therapy a scam
February 4, 2024 10:43 PM   Subscribe

 
Previously
posted by krisjohn at 11:42 PM on February 4 [1 favorite]


Why does Louis look like he's made a bad deal with Dormammu?
posted by krisjohn at 12:08 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]


Man I miss when this channel was repairing computers
posted by benoliver999 at 12:25 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]


* looks at pile of broken MacBooks in corner of room * ehhhhh maybe the metaphor doesn’t work for me. But! I’m glad to see that parts of the manosphere are telling people to go to therapy, and then specifically to say, don’t go to this janky, app version of therapy.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:33 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]


I think I do, but I also find spending 18 minutes watching something that probably boils down to 3-4 key points isn't something I enjoy. Could somebody who enjoys watching videos TLDR the criticism? Is is just "BetterHelp connects people who need qualified help to underqualified low-rent therapists, takes a huge cut, and everybody loses"?
posted by Shepherd at 2:25 AM on February 5 [8 favorites]


The main points I took away:

* Finding a good therapist can be life-changing in a good way.

* A history of having spent tens of thousands of dollars on giving fair trials to many employees in order find the rare few who can actually fix broken Macbooks to an acceptable standard, while also being unwilling to invest more than a few hundred dollars and three hours with one therapist before writing the whole process of therapy off as a pointless waste of time, reveals a stark contrast in how Louis was valuing those Macbooks compared to his own mental health.

* A lot of people give up on therapy similarly quickly, and end up thinking of themselves as doomed to poor mental health forever exactly because they have given up on finding a suitable therapist far more quickly than they would give up on finding just about anything else.

* Good mental health is the linchpin of health in general and of having a life worthy of the name, which makes the pursuit of it worth prioritizing over just about anything else.

* Giving up early on seeking help for a life-limiting mental health issue is a choice, and that choice can lead to internalizing poor mental health as a defining part of one's identity, to the extent that simply having a good friend honestly lay out your demonstrably skewed priorities will simply be heard as some kind of condescendingly victim-blaming insult.

* BetterHelp is all over YouTube, having aggressively pursued a social-media-based promotion strategy, but that doesn't make it a good place to start seeking a good therapist. BetterHelp did approach Louis with a sponsorship offer, which he declined on his usual basis that they weren't an outfit he was already using himself, and which he was glad to have declined after researching their frankly appalling business practices record.

* YouTube content creators who accept sponsorships from outfits whose products and services they don't personally use have a very strong incentive not to look too closely at their sponsors' actual business practices; wilful ignorance and its associated plausible deniability can make the difference between being able to live with the guilt of a harmful recommendation and not.

* The primary skill of most YouTube content creators is looking sincere while talking into a camera, and mistaking that skill for trustworthiness is a mistake.

* YouTube content creators can't possibly care about you personally if they don't even know you exist, which is almost always the case. Your relationship with almost all of the YouTubers you watch is parasocial at best.

* As a matter of personal policy you should not trust information presented to you by any content creator whose work you enjoy without subjecting it to extensive cross-checking and research, most of it preferably not involving YouTube; Louis is completely explicit about including himself in the list of people whose content you really need to reality check.

* As a matter of personal policy you should be particularly vigilant about recommendations that a YouTube content creator has received a direct financial benefit for making to you.
posted by flabdablet at 3:58 AM on February 5 [42 favorites]


Since BetterHelp’s practices come up here, when I was severely depressed, they turned me away for being too sick. Real medical organizations don’t turn away dying people for being sick as policy.

(I’m better now. Turns out I have genetic issues with folate processing, which means my brain couldn’t produce sufficient neurotransmitters.)
posted by vim876 at 6:07 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]


I unsubscribed from Rossman when his channel started featuring more videos dumping on NYC than fixing hardware. Then he moved to Florida, and the one thing i didn't need in my life was more Florida.

But yeah, this particular outfit always seemed not merely disingenuous, but dangerous. You can't automate mental health care like this and expect good results.
posted by 1adam12 at 6:37 AM on February 5 [5 favorites]


Turns out I have genetic issues with folate processing, which means my brain couldn’t produce sufficient neurotransmitters.

This is a sidebar but I'm so glad you figured it out. I also have those genetic issues and when I was on a drug that depleted folate I turned into a parsnip for six months. My new live-in girlfriend was extremely alarmed.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:56 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]


> Real medical organizations don’t turn away dying people for being sick as policy.

i mean on the one hand if this is true kaiser permanente isn't a medical organization, but you know what, maybe kaiser permanente isn't a medical organization
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:30 AM on February 5 [15 favorites]


A lot of people give up on therapy similarly quickly, and end up thinking of themselves as doomed to poor mental health forever exactly because they have given up on finding a suitable therapist far more quickly than they would give up on finding just about anything else.

Because finding a suitable therapist is a far more time-and-money-sucking-ordeal than just about anything else? And it involves far more variables (Do they take my insurance? Do they take insurance at all? Can I afford their sliding scale? Are they reasonably close, or are they an hour drive across town?) than anything else, even before you get to the “do we click?” part of the story.

And, we’re talking about depressed people, who are far more likely to quickly retreat back into their burrows than pretty much any other type of consumer. Chastising them for giving up quickly is just cruel.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:16 AM on February 5 [17 favorites]


Rossmann is on a whole journey and it’s pretty remarkable how public he is with it. I think it’s great that he is taking his audience to these places and disagree with the calls that he should ‘stick to fixing Mac’s’.

I very much find his politics simplistic and anyone suffering engineer disease is just so tiresome. But I have a soft spot for the nerds nerd, and I genuinely appreciate his efforts to make the world a better place. It’s not clear to me why he’s getting labeled as part of the manosphere. In my limited knowledge he just sounds like lots of other small biz bourgeois. Which generally embodies a reactionary racist and classist conception of crime, government and taxes, and one that is totally unexamined.

Rossmann appears to examining these things, and maybe he will come to the realization that complex social problems don’t have simple solutions. Except poverty- all you need there is to redistribute the lucre and just spend some money.

Anyway, it’s a great rhetorical method to have someone recontextualize their mental health in terms of its relative cost/effort to their hobbies. It struck a cord with me.
posted by zenon at 8:38 AM on February 5 [8 favorites]


I very much find his politics simplistic

He "leans conservative" mainly as an as-yet-largely-unexamined tribal marker, I suspect; pretty much every actual political position I've ever heard him express might as well have come straight from Bakunin once you've scraped off the admittedly thick glaze of Bro. I think he's an interesting man.
posted by flabdablet at 9:16 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]


BetterHelp did approach Louis with a sponsorship offer, which he declined on his usual basis that they weren't an outfit he was already using himself, and which he was glad to have declined after researching their frankly appalling business practices record.

I've never heard of this guy before until today and based on external trappings of who he is and what he talks about (hardware) I doubt I would have ever run across him, so thanks for the post. That said, I have A LOT of respect for anybody in the podcast/YouTube/influencer/celebrity world who not only declines taking sponsorship deals with BetterHelp but who also speaks out against them. So many do-goodery liberal types I follow or listen to (for example, Dahlia Lithwick is one who comes to mind, though that might be more to do with Slate than her personally) push BetterHelp and it's pretty maddening. As I've said in other threads, the ways of thinking and logic that make BetterHelp a terrible service are the same that make the entire healthcare industry terrible for everybody.

Giving up early on seeking help for a life-limiting mental health issue is a choice, and that choice can lead to internalizing poor mental health as a defining part of one's identity, to the extent that simply having a good friend honestly lay out your demonstrably skewed priorities will simply be heard as some kind of condescendingly victim-blaming insult.

I mean, this is the crux of the issue though, isn't it? As well-meaning and "correct" as it is to advise someone to seek therapy, or to make any changes in their life, the issue is that without first accepting and really hearing and listening and empathizing with the person who's suffering, you really are sort of unintentionally engaging in condescending victim-blaming insults. On the other hand, advice to seek therapy, in a vacuum, is good advice, but it can only be heard once the person who's suffering feels understood and respected by the person giving the advice. By the way, this is how therapy works, at its heart, and why services like BetterHelp will never be more than a band-aid at best.
posted by flamk at 9:44 AM on February 5 [7 favorites]


when I was severely depressed, they turned me away for being too sick. Real medical organizations don’t turn away dying people for being sick as policy

They absolutely do? See: the entire American healthcare system. Better Help by all accounts seems like a bad company, but it's not uniquely bad, in the context of how bad our healthcare systems are as a whole. Finding a therapist (or doctor) who will actually treat you, especially if you have multiple, complex, or chronic issues is an absolutely hellish, expensive, laborious enterprise. That labor disproportionately falls on the people with the fewest mental, social, and material resources. And that's assuming it's a possibility at all; many don't have the option to "shop around" for providers.

On the ground, people are opting for BetterHelp (or any of the other tele-health services offered by their parent company Teladoc Health) because that is what is available to them. In that regard, the metaphor of the broken Macbook fits: we should value our well-being more than consumer electronics; and also, for most people, the cheapest chromebook at the Walmart is going to have to make do, regardless.
posted by radiogreentea at 9:53 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]


* As a matter of personal policy you should not trust information presented to you by any content creator whose work you enjoy without subjecting it to extensive cross-checking and research, most of it preferably not involving YouTube; Louis is completely explicit about including himself in the list of people whose content you really need to reality check

QFT
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:57 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]


the issue is that without first accepting and really hearing and listening and empathizing with the person who's suffering, you really are sort of unintentionally engaging in condescending victim-blaming insults.

If I'm remembering Louis's story correctly, the person who pointed out the apparent inconsistency in his values was a good friend who did so in response to Louis having just had a bit of a rant on the uselessness of therapy. So it didn't just kind of come out of the blue, but even then, his immediate reaction was to feel hurt and insulted.

And yes, it is a cruel irony that the people most likely to experience hurt and insult on hearing Get Thee To A Therapist are those whom a good therapist would probably benefit more than most.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]


Finding a macbook repair emplyees requires money and if successful produces money. Success at it can be estimated, and it can scale so you can get good at it by repitition and practice. If you aren't good at finding good macbook repair employees you just find another job yourself. There are even professionals who will offer to do part of the work themselves im exchange for back-end pay if it succeeds (less than the profits!)

Finding an effective therapist lacks almost all of these categories.

Great analogy I guess.
posted by NotAYakk at 10:52 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]


Since BetterHelp’s practices come up here, when I was severely depressed, they turned me away for being too sick. Real medical organizations don’t turn away dying people for being sick as policy.

Yes, this actually happens a lot! I've been turned away by multiple doctors who didn't want to deal with the complications caused by genetic issues. And I have had multiple therapy providers and therapy programs turn me away b/c I was "too sick". In particular, I had multiple mental health programs say they would only accept me for residential programs - which my insurance won't cover and are way too expensive for me to pay out of pocket - and I was too sick for outpatient.

This was in a major US city with some of the top hospitals in the country.

So yes, Better Help is terrible, agreed, but there are significant barriers to accessing therapy, especially for anyone who has significant mental health issues (in my case, trauma which led to lots of self destructive behaviors, though never to the point of suicide attempts).

Anyway, I finally found an amazing therapist, but it took 15 years. And my insurance no longer covers that therapist, so I'm paying out of pocket, because it took SO LONG to find the right fit, that i will do whatever I can to keep seeing him.
posted by litera scripta manet at 11:14 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]


I'm curious why people comment on the length of a video

It's clearly a person's prerogative to do so, but so many examples of "this video took too long to provide the information I wanted" boil down to.. I dunno, it's on the viewer as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not sure the YouTuber featured in the FP should be telling their story any differently, that is for sure. It's their story, and it takes precisely the right amount of time to tell it
posted by elkevelvet at 1:07 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]


I skipped to 8:28 and that is pretty much where he states his thesis. It is succinct and doesn't actually require the preceding 8m28s to get the point across.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:09 PM on February 5


I'm thankful for the summaries of an overlong video presented here, and I miss blogs.
posted by fnerg at 3:16 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]


What video length would be ideal for a post?
posted by Selena777 at 3:30 PM on February 5


It's clearly a person's prerogative to do so, but so many examples of "this video took too long to provide the information I wanted" boil down to.. I dunno, it's on the viewer as far as I'm concerned.

Because time is finite, and lots of Youtube personalities bloat up their videos with intros, title animations, sponsorship ads, and then there's Youtube's own ad system itself. There are reasons they do this, but the effect is still annoying to both casual and dedicate viewers.

The problem is bad enough that there's a browser extension, SponsorBlock, that will mark in color, on the timeline, which portions of videos are intros, sponsorships, etc., to allow you to skip right to the interesting portions. Although its information is crowdsourced, I've seen it work immediately with enough videos to conclude that it must be fairly popular.
posted by JHarris at 3:45 PM on February 5 [3 favorites]


bloat up their videos with intros, title animations, sponsorship ads, and then there's Youtube's own ad system itself

All of these things contribute to my usual practice of providing Piped links to YouTube items. Piped plays the video without ads and also implements SponsorBlock inside its own player, skipping sponsorship and self-promotion content automatically by default.

I also almost always quote the play time of any video or audio item I link to whose point is going to take more than a few seconds to become obvious, so if I'm offering you something that's going to run for longer than you have time for then you know that before clicking through.

Even without Piped, though, YouTube's advertising is easy to remove: just use a browser with uBlock Origin installed in it (you can even have that on iOS these days). On Android, you might want to look at Grayjay.
posted by flabdablet at 7:28 PM on February 5 [3 favorites]


The way he talks about his employees as both close personal friends and disposable trash that he can shit on using his youtube platform makes me think he should keeping shopping for another therapist.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 9:03 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]


« Older Spoiler: the answer is famine. Manmade famine.   |   Red pandas in Australia successfully give birth... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments