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July 21st, 2004, 08:37 AM
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Member
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 58
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Re: In-Roads to Online Therapy
You make some excellent points, loftus, and I'm inclined to agree with your overall assessment of modalities: face-to-face therapy is clearly superior to online therapy. Some patients in the US, however, aren't making a choice between traditional and online therapy; they're making a choice between online therapy and nothing at all. (It's a matter of geographic isolation, which probably isn't such a big deal in the UK.) Do we risk "devaluing our profession" by delivering online treatment for these people? To my mind, the question is backwards. I think we risk devaluing our profession by not treating these people. After all, any kind of help we can offer, even if it's inferior to the "real thing", is better than abandoning them.
But this article brings me to an area that I'm not so sure about. Some people wouldn't go to an office to seek "sex therapy", but they would accept services online. Is this a similar situation to the geographically isolated people mentioned above? After all, we still have a patient who's making a choice between online modalities and none at all. Also, how about social anxiety disorder sufferers? Aren't many of them in the same boat?
It's something that I still haven't made up my mind about yet.
P.S. "Users" is a perfectly dreadful term; I don't know how you stand it 
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