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.
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