Talkspace: Virtual Therapy App

Honestly I have a love hate relationship with this app. On one hand, I do love it! It’s an incredibly accessible way to get the help you need. It’s easy to set up and I feel most people you talk with are attentive. Why I hate it? I’ve now switched prescribers 4 times???? The first time, the person didn’t send in a refill, I contacted them, they never responded and I ran out of medication. They also NEVER remembered my personal life and granted I know they might have a lot of clients but still! The second person was great! Up until they weren’t…they just stopped adding times to their schedule and I reached out weeks in advance and no response. The third person saw me once and just ditched me and now I’m with a new prescriber because apparently the third just left? It’s incredibly frustrating to have unreliable prescribers that can just up and leave! I get if the client and prescriber might not be a good fit but come on! Either way, if you struggle to go places for therapy or medication, this is an incredibly accessible space. However, don’t expect it to be your permanent solution because apparently most prescribers on there just don’t care (live in the Texas area at the time so prescribers linked to this area were where I was struggling with).

I can’t blame the app for quality of therapists- I think it does a lot to make therapy available to people. And I’ve had good experiences personally. But it isn’t a very user friendly format throughout. Signing up isn’t always super intuitive- if you put in insurance and it looks like they find it (you get clear message if they don’t at all) you go through a questionnaire and then they ask you to subscribe if they think your insurance doesn’t cover the sessions. So if something processed wrong, and say you know you have coverage for $20 copay, you aren’t clear from that screen before you subscribe whether it’s going through that way or not- maybe you think you’ll get reimbursed or something else-but they didn’t find that coverage. My insurance is weird and I had to try it under a couple different companies to get the coverage to show, but it finally showed the copay. But then randomly after an app update, they decided my coverage expired (my insurance hadn’t changed) and emailed me early the morning of a session, and 8 minutes later emailed to cancel the session to avoid fees. There is still no actual customer support you can talk to immediately- though the chatbot gives the false impression you might be connected to someone. You have to submit a message and wait up to 3 days if an article doesn’t help. This doesn’t seem like a great set up for people dealing with depression and anxiety and other issues- to have things like the app suddenly cancel their appointment for an issue that could be sorted with a couple minutes of human contact but you don’t have anyone available to sort it.

I will start by saying that I have been with my therapist and talkspace for years now but there are a number of issues: the biggest one being, insurance being out of network but there’s no notification of that. I just recently discovered that my insurance is OON and I had no idea until Talkspace requested payments and i checked my insurance portal. This is a HUGE deal when it comes to treatment. I, myself work in healthcare as a utilization reviewer that works to get prior authorizations so I know the urgency of ensuring not only are patients covered but that it’s communicated when they are not. When you’re doing messaging sessions weekly which are being billed for and you don’t know that they’re not covered then that only increases the need for therapy…. An alert notification in app would help to notify patients when their benefit information has changed or a phone call. Next, the glitches are pretty annoying. Having to restart the app essentially when it freezes and now with upgrading to a new phone it does not want to open with my FaceId then it just keeps trying to open itself and I have to swipe out of it, move my face away, and enter my passcode instead. I’ll have to see if I can turn off the FaceID to just use my passcode. I love my therapist and don’t intend to leave her but this insurance issue is a big issue for me.