Matching with a counselor based on your needs is easy. The support team will help you out with specific criteria and match you with your preferred counselor if you have difficulty yourself. Being able to message your counselor as often as you like is wonderful. In traditional therapy only communicating weekly at more cost than this service is a huge put out and put off.
I always felt like if I had an issue on a Thursday but wasn't getting in until Friday I already had to find a way to get through it, and with so much life happening each day I wouldn't have enough time in a 50-minute session to get beyond just going over my week and it would take forever at a huge cost to get comfortable/know if a counselor was a good fit or not. I never felt I was really getting "help" in traditional therapy and it caused so much strain, making life work around the counselor's availability rather than my own.
All that is done away with BetterHelp! No more commute, no more taking inconvenient time out of life trying to get better by having to make something else worse, no more waiting all week, no more feeling awkward each session. I love the option for introverted people to just engage in live typing or sending a message anytime that will be responded to within 24 hours, no more fight with insurance to get in and immense difficulty to change practitioners. All the benefits, NONE of the hassle.
There are awesome groupinars that go on live where you can anonymously communicate/connect with other members using the service from all around the world, but if it doesn't work for your schedule as long as you sign up you get access to the recording for a week, and even if you miss out on that, they will repeat. You have a safe online journal that is private but you can share passages with your counselor as you see fit.
Even if you change counselors you can copy all your message exchanges to Word or some other document and it shortens the "getting to know you's" with your next counselor. Someone took all the big problems with traditional counseling and decided to fix them all at once, and I can't confirm that, but I genuinely think that's how BetterHelp was created.
Length of Use: 1–2 years
Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend
Pros and Cons
A number of ways to work with my budget
Fast matching to a counselor
Ease of ability to change counselors if someone doesn't fit right
The support team is fast and diligent about answering questions or helping with an issue
Being able to message your counselor anytime bridges the gap of standard therapy practices
Groupinars - oh my are they wonderful with such broad ranges of topic
Their sister site Regain for marriage/relationship counseling is also wonderful and offers the same opportunities
This is not a money grab, if you need to cancel they will offer that "pause" and not bill you further, they are good about crediting
Sometimes the counselors licensed in your area can be few to choose from when you have a specific need