This is virtual therapy’s moment. Can it last?

I open Instagram for the only glimpse I have of my friends in the outside world. As I scroll, ad after ad assures me that support for loneliness is just a click away.

As much of the country shelters in place due to the global pandemic, virtual therapy is having a moment. The inability to visit a therapist in person, paired with the anxiety and isolation caused by mandatory social distancing, seems to have created a perfect storm for therapy apps to provide an umbrella.

There's a wide variety of options: Some services connect you to an actual human therapist via video chat, some walk you through self-help exercises to do on your own, while others are either a hybrid of those two approaches or meet somewhere in the middle. Over the last few months, companies across the virtual therapy spectrum have not only seen existing users checking in for sessions more often, but an explosion of new sign-ups as well. Read more...

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