Sorry for sending you to a vote that wasn’t initially working! You can now vote on the Talkspace therapy proposal.
Update:
Please vote no to Talkspace!
Kathryn pointed out, as did some of the shareholders in the comments, that the sketchy vibe I got from the Talkspace website does seem to exist throughout the company. In fact, it’s quite possible this company sucks!
New York Times article from August 2020, At Talkspace, Start-Up Culture Collides With Mental Health Concerns, points out:
has questionable marketing practices and regards treatment transcripts as another data resource to be mined. Their accounts suggest that the needs of a venture capital-backed start-up to grow quickly can sometimes be in conflict with the core values of professional therapy, including strict confidentiality and patient welfare.
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“These are corporate platforms first. And they offer therapy second.”
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Ms. Frank is the company’s head of clinical services; as of Aug. 6, her LinkedIn page said she had a master’s degree in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from the New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, but she never completed the program.
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Talkspace gave employees “burner” phones to help evade the app stores’ techniques for detecting false reviews. “They said, ‘Don’t do it here. Do it at home. Give us five-star ratings because we have too many bad reviews,’
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former employees and therapists told The Times that individual users’ anonymized conversations were routinely reviewed and mined for insights.
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In 2018, a therapists advocacy group called the Psychotherapy Action Network wrote a letter to the A.P.A. and to the Olympian Michael Phelps, who has appeared in ads for Talkspace, calling the company a “problematic treatment provider who aggressively sells an untested, risky treatment.”
And another article from back in 2016 on The Verge highlights how much of this is just the corporate culture:
Multiple former workers told The Verge they had reported a safety concern, and were denied access to client contact information.
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The Verge spoke with two current Talkspace therapists and five therapists who have left the company recently. Each described an atmosphere of micromanagement and disillusionment, a therapy clinic placing too big an emphasis on client retention at the expense of therapists’ well-being.
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After being sent detailed questions by The Verge. Frank sent several legally threatening emails to editorial staff at The Verge, as well as to the CEO of Vox Media,
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Therapists also have a number of "scripts" they are instructed to insert into their chats under certain circumstances, which calls into question Talkspace’s claim that it is merely a digital landlord for therapists in private practice. Some of the scripts are mandatory, including one to advertise video chats.
Here is a cute picture of Georgie to compensate for all the bad news about a dumb therapy app.
