How Big Data Could Improve Your Next Therapy Session
Why my experience in therapy and working at The Crisis Text Line has taught me to trust the iPad
About eight months ago, I sat in a counselor’s office at my university and we closed the therapy session with her asking me how I was doing.
“I’m doing a lot better,” I said. “Thanks for all the help you’ve been. It means a lot.”
But in truth, I was lying. I was actually doing worse. Life had gotten harder and I was faced with unorthodox challenges and grief that inevitably made me barely able to sleep. I was drinking too much, taking out my anger on my friends, and behaving in a multitude of other self-destructive ways.
I was more depressed than I was the first time I saw the counselor, but I didn’t want her to know it. I didn’t want her to see it as an affront to her competence or aptitude as a social worker. The truth was she cared a lot, and I knew it. She was very competent, asked all the right questions, gave me great coping mechanisms, and it showed.
But even if you have the best social worker in the world, you can still get worse. And I did, but I didn’t want her to take it personally.
