The Reason People Are Afraid of Obtaining Help and Therapy and how EmergencyTherapy.com Might Help

This article is to address why so many people have mental health problems and do not do anything about it. How many people do you know who smoke, drink, eat too much or too little, have anger problems, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, drug addiction or other issues that hurt their lives? If I answer, their are numerous people I meet that fit this description. I feel so many people do not reach out for help because they are worried about facing themselves. Often underneath the negative behaviors are an inner pain or a struggle that has been going on for many years. It might be a parent that didn't treat us right, or abuse we suffered from people (possibly physically or mentally). Whatever the reason, dealing with our past is scary and shows that we are vulnerable. The problem is that if we don't confront the issue it can only get worse. Any of the above mentioned problems can lead to serious issues whether it be health problems, loss of friends, jobs, or even our freedom. I too faced many horrible experiences and it is only when I went to therapy and explored who I really was that I began to find my path. I've found happiness, am married, help others as a psychotherapist and started a company that gives therapy online called EmergencyTherapy.com. EmergencyTherapy.com provides online counseling with licensed professionals and I originally came up with the concept many years ago. It is my belief that by having easy access, 24 hours a day that many people will begin to find help for their problems. Each licensed social worker and psychologist that is hired for emergencytherapy.com is personally picked for their genuine care and interest in helping people. I hope as we head into 2008 that you consider taking the chance to improve your life by obtaining therapy. If you know someone that could use it, it would be an honor if you recommended EmergencyTherapy.com. Happy New Year and may this year be filled with more joy and inner peace.

EmergencyTherapy.com for Therapy And How 9/11 Created A Hero

Therapy from EmergencyTherapy.com may be your first step in changing your life. This is a story from our sister blog AmericanHelpers.blogspot.com. It shows the courage and story of a remarkable man. We wanted to share this story with you to show you how someone used a terrible experience and turned it into something that has helped thousands of kids.

Blake Rockwell was in New York and had been working in banking and investment management when 9/11/2001 killed thousands of people on Wall Street. Even though his office was located in Midtown Manhattan, he had two coworkers who died - one who was his acting boss for a short time while his permanent boss was on medical leave. A couple weeks after 9/11, a good friend died from lung cancer (a nonsmoker) at the age of 32.

After these experiences, Rockwell says “I began to examine my life and what I was doing with it. I questioned what I was truly passionate about. As a result, I created Special Spectators, a Chicago-based 501(c)(3)nonprofit organization, that creates magical days for seriously ill children and their families at college football games across the United States.”

This organization has been helping thousands of children with their work. Since 2002, Special Spectators has created the quintessential Saturday experience complete with tailgate parties, mascots, cheerleaders and marching bands for approximately 3,800 children and parents. Rockwell says “Over the last five years, we've hosted about 110 game day events that provide these kids with special access to people and areas of the stadium that are not accessible to most fans. Our youngsters tour locker rooms, meet coaches and walk on the field during a time out. The field visit is one of my favorite moments. While the kids are standing on the 50 yard line, a stadium announcement tells the fans why these kids are attending the game, explains Special Spectators and asks the crowd to give the children a warm welcome to the stadium. Typically this results in a standing ovation.”

Special Spectators has grown tremendously since their first season
in 2002 when only two schools participated. They now have nearly 40 including Rutgers, Georgia, Oklahoma, Colorado,
Auburn, Miami, Tennessee, and UCLA.

Blake Rockwell deserves a huge thank you and truly is an American Helper. It is people like him who deserve to be applauded. He took his experience and loss on 9/11 and turned it into creating an organization that touches the lives of thousands of sick children. He might not always hear how much he is appreciated but today we are honoring him and inducting him into our American Helpers Hall Of Fame. Rockwell says “The amazing growth and accomplishments we've made in just 5 years-110 game day events enjoyed by 3,800 seriously ill children and parents-has all been done with only volunteers and a total out of pocket cost of only $40,000! That's a little over $10 per person.”

If you would like to see Special Spectators in action, you can view one of their clips on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Special+Spectators%22&search=

For more information about helping this organization please go to
www.SpecialSpectators.org

If you feel you need to make a career change, have a problem you want to overcome, or could use counseling or therapy look at www.emergencytherapy.com to speak with therapists licensed as social workers or psychologists. You might be able to overcome your adversities and create a better life.

EmergencyTherapy.com on Therapy for New Years Resolutions

Therapy from EmergencyTherapy.com is a great idea for those looking to make positive changes for the New Year. It seems around the beginning of each year many of us look back and see what we can improve upon. Examples include quitting smoking, dealing with an anger problem, losing weight, pursuing a new career, finding a healthy relationship or being a better husband, wife, parent, or child. These are all extremely important topics that can greatly improve your life. www.EmergencyTherapy.com is a site created to provide online counseling and therapy. Each therapist is either a licensed social worker or psychologist. The importance of that fact is that each has not only graduated college but either obtained a masters degree or a doctorate. In addition, they have spent enough time studying and working with people that they are capable of providing the help you need. What is the best gift to give yourself for the New Year? My suggestion is to identify difficulties in your life and what the problem is telling you. For example if you feel tired, out of shape, or have trouble breathing your body is saying it wants to be healthier. If you smoke, drink, are overweight than any of these issues might be worthwhile to work on with the therapists at EmergencyTherapy.com. I wish you a wonderful New Year and hope 2008 is filled with happiness, prosperity, and better health for your family and you.

Therapists and Therapy at www.EmergencyTherapy.com, Online Therapy Article

Would Freud have imagined that one day people would be sitting on a computer from the comfort of their home interacting with psychologists and social workers? I am pretty confident he didn't foresee the changes that have begun to take place. This article will explore why the internet is helping therapy evolve into the modern computer age. Let's look at the typical therapy practice. A therapist rents an office or works for an agency. They wait for clients. The clients must travel from wherever they are and attempt to be on time to meet for the counseling sessions. I as a psychotherapist have seen that many people forget the date and time of their sessions, have something important come up, and they possibly are resistant to obtaining counseling. Often when someone first reaches out for help they are ready and willing to talk about it instantly. A typical in person session might not be available for one or two weeks. By the time that date approaches the person might not be willing to share the reason they wanted help. This is common with people who have addictions, fetishes, been abused or are depressed. It takes so much courage to open up and discuss the concern. Many are not ready to sit and talk to someone face to face. In addition, the generations that grew up with the internet are spending so much time doing things online that they want help right away. Online therapy provides privacy, instant help, and helps people not yet ready to go to a therapists office in person. Critics make valid arguments about the challenges faced but the use of online therapy is helping many people. www.EmergencyTherapy.com was founded as a site to offer affordable online therapy with licensed social workers and psychologists. The goal is to help as many people as possible. In addition, research has proven that millions of people have mental health problems but are not getting treatment for it. For those people, online therapy is a great place to begin to explore obtaining help for these problems. If you have something to work on or have a friend in need of help online therapy might be a great place to start. www.EmergencyTherapy.com offers therapy online at a price anyone can afford.

Online Counseling Studies from www.EmergencyTherapy.com

Studies are beginning to discuss the use of online therapy as a medium to help assist people with mental health issues. This is extremely important as the use of internet therapy increases. www.EmergencyTherapy.com was established to assist people to obtain what has been referred to as e-therapy. EmergencyTherapy.com uses only licensed professionals to work with clients. It is their stringent policy of only having licensed social workers and psychologists perform the function of providing help online. The reason for this includes that in order to properly help someone a large amount of study and training is needed. For example, each licensed therapist from www.EmergencyTherapy.com has attended and completed college, graduate school and is licensed in their home state. In addition, they have worked in a variety of settings including hospitals, clinics, mental health organizations and government agencies. It is this fact that allows these therapists to be prepared to handle the tough questions that can often be posed during counseling on the internet. It is often suggested if someone is in a life threatening situation such as being suicidal, they need to go to their local emergency room. The reason for this is they need to have face to face care. For many other issues online therapy can be effective, inexpensive and a relief to people. The reason for this is that many people with mental health problems do not reach out for help for the fear of being embarrassed or looked at as strange. An example of this is a recent person who contacted me about a bizarre obsession they had. If we had met face to face, they might have felt that I would judge them. In fact, this person told me that opening up online was the first step in them managing and getting treatment for this problem. The client reports the obsession became a large part of their life and hurt many of their friendships and interactions. They feared losing their job and family. With proper help using online therapy this individual began to face this problem and learned techniques to help overcome it. This is a classic example of how the internet can be the gateway to obtain online therapy to assist with issues that make people's lives difficult. www.EmergencyTherapy.com is a great way to begin online therapy as an affordable and easy way to obtain assistance.

Therapy at www.EmergencyTherapy.com and National Institute of Mental Health Study on Internet Based PTSD Therapy

This is a fantastic article about the use of internet therapy in a pilot program completed by the National Institute of Mental Health. www.EmergencyTherapy.com provides therapy on the internet with licensed social workers and psychologists. Each therapist has been trained to handle various mental health issues. It is great that a discussion of the efficacy of online help is being opened.


National Institute of Mental Health - Science Update
2007-11-29

Internet-based PTSD Therapy May Help Overcome Barriers to Care

"NIMH-funded researchers recently completed a pilot study showing that an Internet-based, self-managed cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, with effects that last after treatment has ended. This study supports further development of PTSD therapies that focus on self-management and innovative methods of providing care to large numbers of people who do not have access to mental health care or who may be reluctant to seek care due to stigma. The researchers published their study in the November 2007 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Brett Litz, Ph.D., of the National Center for PTSD at the VA Boston Healthcare System and Boston University, and colleagues recruited service members from the Department of Defense who had developed PTSD following the September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon or from recent combat exposure. Forty-five participants first met with a therapist to determine their baseline PTSD and depression symptoms, and then were randomly assigned to one of two 8-week long, therapist-assisted, Internet-based treatments.

One treatment used strategies from CBT, which previous research has shown to be effective in relieving symptoms of PTSD. This CBT-based therapy aimed to first help participants identify situations that triggered their PTSD symptoms by working with a therapist and then improve their ability to manage those symptoms through on-line homework assignments. The other therapy, called supportive counseling, asked participants to monitor their own current, non-trauma-related problems, and then write about those experiences online. These participants also received periodic phone calls or emails from their therapist, who provided supportive but non-directed counseling. Participants in both groups were asked to log on daily to a Web site specific to their assigned treatment. After rating their PTSD and depression symptoms using a checklist, participants were allowed access to the Web site where they could find information about PTSD, stress, trauma, and other related health topics; communicate with their therapist; or complete treatment-specific activities.

After eight weeks of treatment, participants in both groups had fewer or less severe PTSD and depression symptoms, but those in CBT-based therapy showed greater improvements than those in supportive counseling therapy. Six months after their first meeting with a study therapist, participants who received CBT-based therapy showed continued improvements, while those in the supportive therapy group experienced an increase in PTSD and depression symptoms.

These findings suggest the CBT-based online therapy may be an efficient, effective, and low-cost method of providing PTSD treatment following a traumatic event to a large number of people. The researchers noted that fewer people completed the CBT-based therapy than the supportive counseling therapy. However, regardless of therapy group, the discontinuation rate among study participants was similar to the 30 percent discontinuation rate reported in studies of face-to-face treatment. Further study is needed to improve treatment use and completion and to test Internet-based PTSD therapies in a larger study population.

Reference
Litz BT, Engel CC, Bryant R, Papa A. A Randomized Controlled Proof-of-Concept Trial of an Internet-Based, Therapist-Assisted Self-Management Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Am J Psychiatry. 2007 Nov;164(11):1676-84."


We hope that further studies are completed to help educate the public about the use of online counseling or e-therapy. www.EmergencyTherapy.com provides therapy on the internet to help people facing mental health issues. www.EmergencyTherapy.com can be used to help different types of problems as evidenced by the study described above. It is our opinion that as time goes on, online therapy will become more popular and have the ability to be the starting point for many people facing problems. There are too many of us that have issues that effect our lives but that do not obtain treatment. Hopefully, the privacy of the internet will allow many to feel comfortable to make the initial contact. www.EmergencyTherapy.com offers therapy at an affordable price as to allow anyone to obtain online mental health services.

Internet Therapy Article, Online Therapy, EmergencyTherapy.com

The concept of internet therapy and online therapy such as the help offered on the site www.EmergencyTherapy.com has helped numerous people. Here is fantastic article about therapy on the internet.

From USA Today:
"Internet therapy clicks for patients
By Marilyn Elias

Pat Underwood was reeling from a hard slap of midlife emotional pain when she began therapy three months ago. She was grieving over her father's recent death. Old sibling conflicts had resurfaced. After remarrying, she had left good friends behind in Tennessee and moved with her new husband to Madison, Ga., where she had no job or friends. The therapy, she says, "has been a great help. I've been able to work through a lot of problems." She has never met her counselor, though, because he lives 2,100 miles away. He's Peter Chechele (Check-a-lee), a San Francisco marriage and family therapist who treats many clients at his "office" in cyberspace.
Online counseling is the hottest and certainly the most controversial new trend in therapy, many experts say.

Five years ago, six therapists practiced online. Now there are more than 500, says consumer advocate Martha Ainsworth, whose Web site, www.metanoia .org, provides information and independent credentials checks of therapists doing e-therapy. "The field has just exploded," she says.

Therapists practicing on the Net are primarily psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, marriage and family counselors and other licensed professional counselors; very few are psychiatrists.

About 90% of the counseling is done by e-mail, she says. Clients send therapists e-mails any time of the day or night. Counselors typically respond within a day or two, sometimes within hours. Most charge by the e-mail response, but some allow unlimited e-mails over a specific time for a single fee.

Chechele, for example, offers varied plans, including unlimited e-mails over 30 days for $200.

Occasionally, Net counseling is done in "chats" that permit clients and therapists to message back and forth for the usual "50-minute hour" of therapy. There's a small, leading edge of work with Web cameras and audio that allows therapists and patients to visit virtually through their computers.

E-therapy is not suited for people with severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (manic-depression). Medication is not generally prescribed by therapists on the Net because anyone with a problem serious enough to need drugs also needs a face-to-face counselor. But for many others, boosters say, the advantages of Net therapy abound:

* It's tailor-made for business travelers and employed parents who find it hard to carve out daytime hours or keep weekly appointments in one city.
* It costs less. E-mails average $25 to $50 each, Ainsworth says. Even rates of $90 an hour fall below typical therapy charges of $125 to $165.
* It can work faster. There is evidence that people self-disclose more quickly using a computer than they do face-to-face, says Johns Hopkins University psychologist Patricia Wallace, author of The Psychology of the Internet.
* It may attract those too embarrassed to face a therapist: childhood sexual-abuse victims, the obese, those with physical deformities or painful secrets.

Jessica Bride, 26, marketing and communications director for a restaurant chain, had been seeing therapist Mark Sichel in his New York office last year when her work started to require a lot of travel.

As the youngest director her firm ever had, and a woman to boot, "I found I had a lot of challenges on the job," Bride says. A painful romantic breakup added to the stress.

When she's on the road or even at work in New York, e-mail exchanges with Sichel "offer great immediacy. As a problem comes up, you can deal with it right away. I like the rapid response. It heads off trouble when you're right at the edge of blowing," says Bride, who fields about 50 phone calls a day.

The Net's downside

But is such online support truly psychotherapy? No way, critics argue. And can it hurt rather than help? Absolutely, says the chorus of opponents.

The downside of all that lack of inhibition online is greater potential for deception, Wallace says. Either the patient or the therapist may not be who he says he is.

Deception by patients may not even be deliberate.

"Often, a patient will not think they're suicidal or that their problems are serious, and they turn out to be. The Net is packed with depressed people," says San Diego psychologist Marlene Maheu, who runs Netpsych, the largest Internet professional discussion list for U.S. therapists.

She points to therapists' moral responsibility to report impending suicides to emergency agencies and their legal duty to report child abuse or other violence. "Some of these online therapists don't even have the client's address, or the address may not be real. So how can you prevent tragedy?"

So far, no "tragedies" or lawsuits have surfaced, says Russ Newman, executive director for professional practice at the American Psychological Association. But it's debatable whether Net therapy is even legal, he adds. Therapists are licensed to practice in a specific state, so is it all right to treat clients living in another state through the medium of cyberspace?

"We just don't know. This is frontier territory," says Newman, an attorney and psychologist.

There's no research to support the effectiveness of online counseling, and that troubles Maheu. "We're ethically mandated to use treatments based on research. This is like a physician using shark bone on ill patients."

The e-therapist's loss of visual cues can hamper perception. And the lack of cues isn't just dangerous, it can be fatal.

Take a woman with an eating disorder. She claims to be 5-foot-8 and weigh 140 pounds. "You can't trust the veracity here — there can be terrible distortions," says Sichel, the New York therapist. "You can come up with a behavioral plan for a person to lose weight, and this behavioral plan will kill them. ... I'm also afraid of children posing as adults." That's why Sichel uses e-therapy only with those clients he has already seen in his practice.

Trust can be a key issue for help-seekers, too. Plenty of Americans would hesitate to let their traumas all hang out at some place they can't even visualize. In a December 2000 poll by online analysts Jupiter Media Metrix, 42% of 3,500 adult Net users said they'd be so concerned about privacy that they wouldn't consult a therapist online.

A trusting relationship is at the heart of first-rate therapy, and you can't get it staring at a computer, says MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. "You can spill your guts, but spilling your guts is not the same as good therapy," she says.

People err, though, in judging Net therapy against a yardstick of the "real" thing, says Calverton, Md., psychologist Richard Sansbury, who does both kinds. Face-to-face work can get quite complicated. Online works best for clients with a focused, specific problem and a clear goal, for those who are ready to see how they contribute to their problem and to use guided behavioral techniques to solve it.

In online therapy, "I'm not doing a lot that an understanding grandmother wouldn't do, but not everybody has an understanding grandmother," Sansbury says.

Seeing value in e-therapy

Still, some therapy clients feel the Net has unique, powerful value. Troy Hill, a 30-year-old New York actor, has been struggling with his parents' rejection. "I'm gay, and that's just not OK," he says. "I can't change them. And I can't change the fact they want to change me."

Hill forwards some of his father's "attacking" e-mails, along with proposed replies, to Sichel, his therapist. The counselor can see directly what's said by Dad, and also how the words are perceived by Hill.

"It's helped me so much to see if I'm overreacting, whether I'm heightening the conflict by what I write back or helping to resolve it," he says. The work online "has really helped me to set boundaries, to see the good in my relationship with my parents and be realistic in how much I can expect them to understand and accept me."

Even the most ardent critics of e-therapy think it's bound to grow rapidly as audio and video technology advance in the next few years

In the short term, land mines might explode first.

"No doubt, there will be errors, breaches of trust, and tragedy as e-therapy develops," writes Longwood, Fla., therapist Michael Freeny in the March/April 2001 Psychotherapy Networker, a professional journal. "But I think the risks are worth taking if we can provide online care to millions of people who would otherwise not have benefited from mental health services."

Ainsworth concludes: "E-therapy doesn't work for everyone. But for those for whom it does work, it works in a very profound way. This truth should not be minimized, nor should any of the concerns.

"That is the nature of exploring a new frontier."



The above was a great article and shows the discussion about online therapy.
This is certainly an exciting time for therapy and online therapy. www.EmergencyTherapy.com offers therapy and online therapy designed to help you. The therapy provided by www.EmergencyTherapy.com comes from licensed social workers and psychologists. The goal is to provide affordable and easy access to online therapy and e-therapy in order to help overcome various challenges.