World We Imagine Pitch Post 3

 TherapyMe

Our mission is to make therapy affordable for everyone 

Have you ever been, or wanted to go to therapy? 

I have been force-fed a hefty amount of therapy since my parents divorced in 2005. Though I had mixed emotions about it when I was younger, looking back on it as an adult, I can see how it helped me through the turmoil of divorce. Also, as someone who is currently in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, I believe it to be absolutely essential to the progress I have made in myself, my relationships, and my goals. 

When I tell people about how much therapy has helped me and ask if they have ever considered going, the most common response I have heard is, "I would love to, but it's just too expensive."

That conversation is exactly what inspired me to create, TherapyMe. Currently, people pay anywhere from one hundred to two hundred dollars for one therapy session, making the monthly cost of therapy around five hundred dollars if you are going once every one or two weeks. I see this number as outrageous! How could something so essential cost so much?

I believe that the root issue is that in our capitalist society, we are programmed to value the health of the body over the health of the mind when they should be valued equally. If we have a cold or the flu, we won't think twice about spending money on medication to feel better. But when it comes to a mental issue we can't work past without help, we tend to put it aside partly because we value it less and also because the cost of aid is too high!

Clients subscribed to TherapyMe will no longer have to push their mental struggles aside. TherapyMe offers people a monthly subscription consisting of 30-minute Dialectical Behavioral Therapy sessions once a week at the fraction of the cost of traditional therapy methods. 

Before diving into the logistics of TherapyMe, it is essential for AMDI investors to gain background in the type of therapy provided by the program. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) provides clients with skills to manage painful emotions, past traumas, and undesirable behaviors. DBT focuses on four therapeutic skills within the areas of:

1. Mindfulness focuses on improving an individual's ability to accept and be present in the current moment.
2. Distress tolerance is geared toward increasing a person’s tolerance of negative emotion, rather than trying to escape from it.
3. Emotion regulation covers strategies to manage and change intense emotions that are causing problems in a person’s life.
4. Interpersonal effectiveness consists of techniques that allow a person to communicate with others in a way that is assertive, maintains self-respect, and strengthens relationships.

Though clients will receive less facetime with their therapist when compared to the traditional and more expensive approach, they will learn a skill set that will allow them to eventually tackle issues on their own that would have required the help of a therapist. Clients will fill out worksheets during the week about past traumas, current issues, vulnerabilities, quality of relationships (with people and things like food/substances), work, goals, etc. When filling out these worksheets, clients will have informative sheets that help identify what they should be writing down. For example, if someone was questioning whether they should write down "relationship with food" on their weekly worksheet, the informative worksheet might aid them by prompting them with "if you feel guilty about eating, that is a cause for concern" (meaning the client should write that down).

During the therapy sessions, therapists will give clients strategies to combat some (not all) of the issues written down on the weekly worksheet. Clients will then work on their issues during the week and record their progress in addition to other indicators of overall well-being such as mood. It is important that the program will work around tackling the most concerning aspects of the client first. Examples of this include self-harm, eating disorders, addiction, and abusive relationships. For example, if someone struggled with bulimia, we would work on that before working on having an organized room. 

I see TherapyMe as nothing less than revolutionary as it will make for a happier, healthier, and more understanding society. I believe that AMDI should support our company/program because it will fundamentally change humankind's mental health.