As we are building out our first iteration of Peer Collective by degrees we get to help people every single day.
Our customers are people with anxiety, depression, PTSD, anger management issues and a whole myriad of stuff you’d find in the “all mental illness” bracket if you wanted to define it narrowly.
Recently — and with the news that Teladoc is blaming its recent poor performance partially at least on Betterhelp I’ve been talking with people who use the platform, as well as other Telehealth mental health companies like Talkspace.
The basic model is that therapists can get patients through the platforms but are then squeezed on prices in a competitive market place. Effectively, Therapists get paid less for what they do. This doesn’t make much sense — many therapists are amazing and well worth their fee. Some obviously are not but my aim here is not to unfairly persecute therapists as a profession.
But, we have a serious mental health issue in the US. Sky high demand and no supply. Long waiting lists. Providing more customers at lower prices to Therapists arguably leads to:
- A poor experience for the client who feels undervalued
- A poor experience for the therapist who feels unavailable/under resourced
- A poor experience for the platform because customers are churned, become more expensive to acquire and margins are squeezed
We created Peer Collective because we wanted to provide a genuine, safe, human alternative to therapy. A lot of our clients also are in therapy and come to talk to our peer counselors to reflect, react and compare notes on the guidance their therapist provides.
And our peer counselors are amazing people. They are clinically vetted, supported by psychotherapists and have huge amounts of lived experience. We are very strict as to who we take, however (which is different from most peer support platforms) — between 1% and 3% of people who apply get accepted. Interestingly we turn away a lot of qualified psychotherapists because they fail on empathy or the ability to form bonds (again this is not a generalization about therapists — but anecdotally it does happen).
We screen people, train them and then pay them $20/hour which is as much as we can afford at the moment — in time that will change! People can book with them for as little as $28/hour and we take the difference to run the platform.
BUT — and here’s the thing — it works. There are people who come to us who we would refer to therapists but most people can get help and support from peer counselors. If the peer counselor is good enough, the effect on the client can be extraordinary. We see this first hand every single day.
If we can recruit enough quality peer counselors with the right level of clinical rigor and support (we 100% believe that we can), then we genuinely have a chance to help millions of people access first rate mental health support.
