It is amazing how much improvement I have seen with online counseling. When I started as an online therapist in 2006, it was quite different from today. It was mostly over the phone and I found it to be surprisingly effective. I had originally got my training from the Crisis Center in Lafayette, Indiana. One would think that a crisis center might not be the ultimate place to get your teletherapy training, but it turned out to be ideal. I had extensive training in helping people with crises strictly over the phone. I had to learn very quickly how to become effective and proficient with just simply a telephone and a computer to make some local referrals to mental health centers, hospitals, and other relevant community resources that the person might need.
Because I had more than 500 hours of helping people in really tough situations over the telephone, often in a therapeutic way, I did not realize that going into graduate school at Indiana University would prepare me to be a very proficient online therapist.
When I started my first agency therapist position as a mental health therapist, there was no option of online counseling whatsoever. It was strictly office therapy. As I worked for the first couple of years in order to get my Indiana license as a licensed clinical social worker, I saw the great inefficiencies of only being able to work with people in my office.
Once I started private practice as Buck Black Therapy, I immediately added telephone calls as a mode of therapy or as a hybrid counseling option. I had quite a few of my office clients do phone counseling sessions with me. Most of them discussed how it’s extremely helpful and plenty quit coming to my office and only used teletherapy. However, there were a few people who found they needed the structure of a face-to-face counseling session. Overall, phone counseling was very helpful for most people and it increased the benefits of therapy.
Not long into my practice, video sessions became high enough quality that they replaced many of the phone counseling sessions. I had even more clients who were utilizing the true online counseling experience. I ended up helping plenty of people who were living too far from my office in order to make the drive for counseling. There were still plenty of glitches with the video therapy, but it worked quite well overall. Of course, the phone was a backup for our online counseling and it needed to be used at times, just like it is still a backup today.
After I realized the success of online counseling, I expanded to adding the specialty of www.truckertherapy.com to my practice. I began specializing in helping truck drivers who were unable to keep office visits because they were rarely home. This proved to be hugely successful, and I further sharpened my skills by helping people with phone counseling and online counseling whom I will never meet in person.
I was a regular guest on the SiriusXM radio show with Tim Ridley. I would answer questions and talk about the common mental health issues of the time. I would even answer specific calls. This was on the trucking channel and it was aimed specifically at truckers, but there were plenty of people who were getting mental health help who were not truckers. I was very happy that I could help people on such a grander scale.
After about three years of regular radio shows on SiriusXM satellite radio, I decided to focus solely on my practice, which kept me more than busy.
Shortly after the radio show ended, the pandemic began. I was naturally set up to convert my practice to 100% online counseling in order to help all of my clients and the general public with their therapy needs when it was deemed unsafe to come to traditional office therapy. I was far ahead of most therapists who had only heard of online counseling and had zero preparation.
For the first two years of the pandemic, I helped as many clients as much as humanly possible in a 100% online counseling mode. I still had some people who used phone therapy because they were uncomfortable with the technology or their Internet was simply not good enough.
It was interesting to see that my own computer could not keep up with my online therapy appointments for a 10 or 12-hour workday. I quickly learned that my computer which was just a few years old was overheating– I also had growing pains. This was embarrassing for me, but luckily, I could switch to my tablet to split the workload in order to keep things flowing smoothly. I quickly purchased a new computer that proved that it was up to the task and it could do more hours of video in a day than I had energy for!
Now that the pandemic has passed, I still have a high demand for online counseling, and some people still want to do phone therapy. I have found that a high percentage of clients prefer online counseling at this point and they discuss how it is so much easier to address their mood issues and couples therapy issues by doing a video call.
The significant improvement in session quality because of better devices and better quality Internet since the pandemic has shown that online therapy is often as good as being in the office. Sometimes it is better than office therapy because there are no traffic problems and bad weather, including snow storms, is not much of a problem anymore!
Few clients have asked me for office therapy in the past few years. There are some people who need office therapy because they just simply want to talk with another person face-to-face or have an unsafe environment at home. For those clients, I refer them to other therapists that I personally know to provide traditional psychotherapy.
From my professional experience, I see what appears to be about the same level of success with online therapy versus traditional office therapy. There have been plenty of times I have helped more people by providing online counseling because they did not have a reliable car or did not have the time to drive to my office. Since plenty of people are located in rule Indiana, driving to my office on a regular basis for therapy is not practical.
Overall is my opinion that online therapy helps me to council more people and provide mental health services to those who would not have gotten help in the first place. Teletherapy takes a lot of hassle out of the counseling commitment!