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Are you one of the thousands of people who wonder whether there are any free therapy options to cope with the result of the COVID-19 pandemic? It is beyond doubt that the lives of Americans and people all around the world have been affected by the global COVID-19 Pandemic, and people are struggling to cope with being isolated, being worried about their oversees relatives, and dealing with the anxiety of what tomorrow might bring. Many are urged to seek counseling and use other tools for mental health support in these trying times.
While there may be free therapy resources offered by some individual counties and/or organizations, we would like to share one valuable resource that we came across.
In an effort to help America cope and heal during this global crisis, Online-Therapy.com is making some of its valuable mental health resources free to the public. Online-Therapy. com is an online therapy platform that uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you to identify, challenge, and overcome your dysfunctional thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. This service offers many tools to use on your own as well as with your assigned therapist and has several different subscription plans to choose from, depending on how much support you need.
While the free therapy version of the service does not include therapy sessions or feedback from the therapist, you still get access to an amazing CBT toolkit that forms the basis of their entire therapy system.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a model of psychotherapy that focuses on recognizing, challenging, and overcoming unhelpful and dysfunctional thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Through its various techniques, it teaches you how to develop coping strategies, learn to apply critical thinking to unproductive behaviors, reactions, thoughts and thus improve emotional regulation. While originally designed to treat depression, it has shown tremendous success in treating anxiety and a number of other mental health conditions and acute issues, including irritability, anger, addiction, impulsivity, coping with grief, eating disorders, relationship issues, insomnia, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), OCD, social anxiety, self-esteem and confidence issues, among many others.
CBT techniques can help you become proactive and develop tools to manage your own productivity and disciplinary growth, as well as measure your progress.
How do free therapy options made available by online-therapy.com work?
The core of the CBT program that you would have access to as part of your free therapy access, consists of 8 sections, each representing a step in learning how to identify, challenge and overcome your dysfunctional thinking patterns, behaviors and emotions. Each section contains different worksheets for you to work through on your own by answering specific questions that address your individual challenges. The free therapy version does not include therapist’s feedback, but the tools themselves are still valuable and, if you’d like to try their premium service, which includes various degree of interaction with a licensed therapist (depending on the plan you select), you can do so with a 14-day money back guarantee! We will outline their other plans along with pricing and what they include below.
If you prefer an online therapy that will most resemble traditional therapy sessions, you may want to check Betterhelp – a highly reputable online therapy platform that gives unlimited access to therapy for a flat weekly rate ranging from $40-70/week (billed monthly). Betterhelp offers a free evaluation to assess your needs, so that may be a good option to test the waters.
If you’d like to try free therapy options offered by Online-Therapy.com, check out their Plans and Pricing
Online-Therapy. com has 4 plans to choose from, each step up adding benefits to the previous one.
Free therapy plan to help cope with COVID-19 includes 8 sections of CBT that include 25 easy to follow worksheets, as well as yoga and meditation videos, journals, activity plans, and tests.
The Basic Plan ($31.96 for the first week with the 20% discount, and $39.95/week thereafter, BILLED MONTHLY) includes the above but also adds daily therapist’s feedback Mon-Fri
The Standard Plan ($47.96 for the first week with the 20% discount, and $59.95/week thereafter, BILLED MONTHLY) includes all of the Basic Plan benefits, but also adds messaging support and 1 live chat session per week with your therapist
The Premium Plan ($63.96 for the first week with the 20% discount, and $79.95/week thereafter, BILLED MONTHLY)includes all of the Standard Plan but gives you 2 live chat sessions per week with your therapist instead of 1, and adds “express replies” perk.
Online-Therapy is a fantastic resource to use for those dipping their toes into mental health self-care, but their dedication to a proactive approach and CBT may or may not be suitable for some users. If you are looking for unlimited back and forth interactions with a licensed therapist to overcome an acute crisis, perhaps other resources may be more appropriate either as standalone or as an addition to CBT. Check out top-rated unlimited subscription online therapy options here.
We hope you find this information helpful – don’t forget to share with those who may benefit from free therapy.
Stay well and healthy – we will get through this together.
