A click away

Perhaps many of you saw the article in The Sunday NYT entitled "When your Therapist is Only a Click Away.

It described how the method of doing therapy over Sype is catching on, and that many people would have more access to therapy that way.


Of course most of the therapeutic community was not too thrilled with the idea, especially those of us who had to climb a fire-escape to peer through a window to watch Howdy Doody, before our family broke down (or saved up) to get our own TV.  Most therapist agree that it is important to have a person-to-person meeting in order to have the kind of person-to-person relationship that is necessary for therapy to work.

  I feel that being in the same room with patients is much more emotionally intense, much more revealing, and can lead to much faster changes.  Talking to a screen, is a little weird for people my age (old).  It makes me feel too much like my crazy aunt who had running conversations with the TV.

But it is certainly a generational thing.  People under 40, and certainly under 28, have spent much of their lives in front of screens.  That's how the world comes to them.  So many people have worked in cubicles, staring a screen all day, now they work from home, staring at screens.  But it must seem very natural to them to get and give information that way.

I just tried to download some puzzles to my phone. But this app wanted my personal info and my email, and then wanted me to post my results on Facebook and email them to seven friends.  I don't want my friends to know I'm doing puzzles on my phone.  But I guess lots of people do.  Maybe that's why no one is working.

But the future of the Independent Practice of psychotherapy lies with those smart-phones.  I can see that within five to ten years many people will have a "Therapist App" which will be a direct "Facetime" link to their therapist.  Each of us in independent practice will have about ten to twenty clients, and we will be "on" all the time. Sixty ten minute conversations a day. "Get ready to talk to your boss" --Get back to work --- She looks cute to me, go talk to her -- How did that make you feel?  That was an interesting conversation with your mother. 

Real emotion, Real behavior; Real Time.

Heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, sweat glands, all kind of bio-feedback information will be measured instantly from the hand-held device.

All billed immediately through Pay-Pal.

It will not be the same as the therapy that we give now, sitting fairly close together, with pauses, silences and staring at the wall or the carpet.  Having your therapist in your pocket could create all kinds of over-dependencies, or it could keep you shaped-up, as those little lies, exaggerations and omissions that people tell their therapists will become more difficult to get away with.

Things will be different.  They already are.  There are always trade-offs.







Perhaps five years is too long.