#betterhelp

miku fun fact #172

one time, when I was in between therapists or hadn’t been to one in a while, I talked to a text message therapist via betterhelp

It was expensive and not covered by insurance but at the time I could afford it.

what I couldn’t afford was time. I was so busy. woke up at 645, on the bus by 7 something, at work by 915, stayed til 6 or a little after, then commute home, then dinner, then walk or gym, then call home, then shower, make lunch for work the next day, then read in bed until I fell asleep and couldn’t stay awake. and I stayed awake as long as I could as a kind of silent protest, like, no, this is the only time I get for my hobbies and what I care about beyond work and maintenance

so I used betterhelp. They advertise a lot on podcasts. I even had to record an ad for them one time. somewhere on some podcast there’s me reading an ad for betterhelp, “use code …. “

it was nice to just jot down thoughts and feelings to my therapist in my spare time, spare moments between meetings, on the commute. it was not always “live,” sometimes it was asynchronous, like they’d get back to you later, within a certain time period

but they never wrote back very thoughtfully. often just gave me questions and no insight. more questions to answer, more typing. more like “figure yourself out but through talking to me.” well, writing to me. but it felt like talking to myself but very inefficiently and over a longer time period than normal

oh and you had to take a personality assessment before you were paired. in real life I think you just get assigned whoever is available and takes your insurance or who you can afford. but the assessment wasn’t that helpful, I never really clicked with them, but I tried I few

there was a feature where you could just drop a therapist, no questions asked, and get another one, mid conversation. they’d never know why you dropped them or replaced them. I felt bad but I did it once or twice

I remember the last one. some guy. he was so chipper, you could tell even just via text

I sent some long paragraph and all he said was

“and how does that feel? I’ve never been depressed before”

But it's also just fascinating to me that, like, *this* specific sponsor is the one that always gets people riled up without fail. There are plenty of YouTube sponsors that a lot of people will (rightly!) call out for being unethical or shitty or dishonest, but none of them seem to ever attract the level of venom that someone doing a BetterHelp spot gets.

Like we've got a fucking law firm out here sponsoring YouTubers for some Godforsaken reason and I've never seen people bring a tenth of the anger and bewilderment to how bizarre a spectacle that is as they do to BetterHelp.