MuchBetterHelp
The problem with writing a book about the uberisation of therapy is that its a complex and depressing story about the industrialisation platformisation datafication and appification of care. That’s a lot of ations to squeeze into a TLRL thread on social media. And much as I like to stretch my patient-me muscle memory by staring blink blink into the abyss, sometimes you just need to be a bit more positive.
One thing I’ve learned writing UberTherapy is that there are no experts on the future. No step by step guide out of surveillance and algorithmic curation or how to game our inevitable engagement with the attention economy. Critical thinking and placing technologies in context all well and good but even if I could understand my glimpses into the algorithmic black box, I still have to find a way of sitting along side the digital intermediaries of my work.
The last chapter of my book is called MuchBetterHelp and its probably the most evolving and challenging part of the process for me. Made useless by clever categoricals about solidarity and collective action, exhausted and depleted by the many failed struggles to protect our work I’m at the point of needing to place myself in the future. Just as well then that necessity really does breed innovation and as the weeks go by more and more self organised groups and politically savvy business models start to pop up and with it some of the future fault lines of what MuchBetterHelp might look like.
But as has ever been the way in the large language models of digital health, the experiences and consequences of the new business of mental health are not captured or measured by customer satisfaction surveys or standardised wellbeing questionnaires. Either from the perspective of the new patient-client-consumers or the practitioners behind the therapy apps, much of the data gets missed in amongst the algorithmic correlations and linear regressions. We really don’t know what the uberisation of therapy means without collecting and understanding of the cold and warm data of our experiences that underpin the what next.
We are now in the last few weeks of The Digital Therapy Survey looking at the experience of therapists in the UK and USA using digital tools and working for online therapy platforms.
If you use any digital or AI tools in your work as a counsellor or therapist take our 15 minute survey www.thedigitaltherapyproject.org
We are a non-commercial confidential survey. We won’t make money out of you or sell your data to the Big Data Daddy in the sky.
The project link is here www.thedigitaltherapyproject.org
The survey link is here https://cardiffmet.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8vUQU420XJxOoKy
The survey social media is @DigitalTherapyS
Please distribute through your networks so that we can reach as widely as possible practitioners and users and understand their experiences of digital therapy.