yaelingh Uncategorized

Flattening The Curve – Sessions Go Online This Week!

Dear clients, friends, and community members,

In light of recent recommendations from the medical community and state government to reduce social contact and public exposure in order to help reduce overall spread of the novel coronavirus, therapy sessions will be moving online as of the upcoming week (Monday 3/16/20). Let’s work together to #flattenthecurve and keep our community healthy!

waitingroom2

thera-link-mug

 

 

 

 

 

Thera-Link is a secure, HIPAA-compliant, appropriately encrypted platform that a number of clients have already been using since early 2019. Clients have joined therapy sessions using their computers and/or phones, and have so far usually reported it to be very easy to use.

Current clients will be contacted individually with the necessary information to join their therapy sessions this week. New clients* are also still welcome to schedule sessions!

Intersectional Life Counseling and Psychology offers remote video sessions (in-office sessions suspended temporarily) for PA residents, as well as sliding-scale rates from $70.

Please email us if you would like to schedule or have any questions!

(*Please note: clients MUST be in PA during sessions due to licensure and legal issues.)

StayHomeGame

Stay Home Simulator by Brendon Chung @BlendoGames
yaelingh Uncategorized

Flattening The Curve – Sessions Go Online This Week!

Dear clients, friends, and community members,

In light of recent recommendations from the medical community and state government to reduce social contact and public exposure in order to help reduce overall spread of the novel coronavirus, therapy sessions will be moving online as of the upcoming week (Monday 3/16/20). Let’s work together to #flattenthecurve and keep our community healthy!

waitingroom2

thera-link-mug

 

 

 

 

 

Thera-Link is a secure, HIPAA-compliant, appropriately encrypted platform that a number of clients have already been using since early 2019. Clients have joined therapy sessions using their computers and/or phones, and have so far usually reported it to be very easy to use.

Current clients will be contacted individually with the necessary information to join their therapy sessions this week. New clients* are also still welcome to schedule sessions!

Intersectional Life Counseling and Psychology offers remote video sessions (in-office sessions suspended temporarily) for PA residents, as well as sliding-scale rates from $70.

Please email us if you would like to schedule or have any questions!

(*Please note: clients MUST be in PA during sessions due to licensure and legal issues.)

StayHomeGame

Stay Home Simulator by Brendon Chung @BlendoGames
yaelingh Uncategorized

Choosing What Kind of Therapy to Seek

We receive a lot of mixed messages about what it means to “talk to someone” when experiencing distress. Does it mean going to a hospital? The ER? Inpatient? Outpatient? Is it mostly for people who are suicidal or experiencing hallucinations? Is it really just for rich people who don’t have survival stress? Where should you even start looking?

Call me biased, but I truly believe that in fact most people could really use some kind of therapy at some point in their lives!

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) has a useful graphic (below) to help figure out which path might be the most useful for you to pursue, based on your own preferences and needs.

To be clear, this is primarily about psychology / counseling, which most therapy falls under, rather than psychiatry, despite how therapy is portrayed in most movies and TV shows. (To better understand the general difference between seeing a psychologist versus seeing a psychiatrist, ADAA has a useful explainer here.)

final-therapygu_23840851_3ad732e6e2a37020f3ac49fcaf48f6305f631dcf

Did you find an approach that sounds like it might work for you? I hope so!

Intersectional Life Counseling and Therapy offers nearly all of these options: in-person sessions (individual and groups when available, and even outdoors!) as well as teletherapy sessions by video. (We do not offer text-based interventions.) See the chart below to compare them!

Video Sessions Using Thera-Link

Compare Session options:

In Office Sessions Video Session Hiking (In Season)
Standard Rates

✓

✓

✓
Discounts Apply

✓

✓

✓
Pre-pay required

X

✓

✓
Open Path (limited means) Availability

✓

✓

✓
Client Location Lancaster Service Area Outside of Lancaster Service Area (PA only) Lancaster Service Area
Intake Process Set up in-office intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake determines acceptance for therapy or referral. Set up video intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake determines acceptance for therapy or referral. Set up in-office intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake session MUST BE IN OFFICE.

If accepted for therapy may schedule for hiking or in-office sessions as desired.
Insurance Reimburses Depends on insurance plan Depends on insurance plan Depends on insurance plan
EAPs cover (Quest/M&S)

✓

TBD

TBD
Helps you get out of the house!

✓

X

✓

Please contact us today by email or phone to schedule!

 

yaelingh Uncategorized

Choosing What Kind of Therapy to Seek

We receive a lot of mixed messages about what it means to “talk to someone” when experiencing distress. Does it mean going to a hospital? The ER? Inpatient? Outpatient? Is it mostly for people who are suicidal or experiencing hallucinations? Is it really just for rich people who don’t have survival stress? Where should you even start looking?

Call me biased, but I truly believe that in fact most people could really use some kind of therapy at some point in their lives!

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) has a useful graphic (below) to help figure out which path might be the most useful for you to pursue, based on your own preferences and needs.

To be clear, this is primarily about psychology / counseling, which most therapy falls under, rather than psychiatry, despite how therapy is portrayed in most movies and TV shows. (To better understand the general difference between seeing a psychologist versus seeing a psychiatrist, ADAA has a useful explainer here.)

final-therapygu_23840851_3ad732e6e2a37020f3ac49fcaf48f6305f631dcf

Did you find an approach that sounds like it might work for you? I hope so!

Intersectional Life Counseling and Therapy offers nearly all of these options: in-person sessions (individual and groups when available, and even outdoors!) as well as teletherapy sessions by video. (We do not offer text-based interventions.) See the chart below to compare them!

Video Sessions Using Thera-Link

Compare Session options:

In Office Sessions Video Session Hiking Session
Standard Rates

✓

✓

✓
Discounts Apply

✓

✓

✓
Pre-pay required

X

✓

✓
Open Path (limited means) Availability

✓

✓

✓
Client Location Lancaster Service Area Outside of Lancaster Service Area (PA only) Lancaster Service Area
Intake Process Set up in-office intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake determines acceptance for therapy or referral. Set up video intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake determines acceptance for therapy or referral. Set up in-office intake assessment session via phone or email. Intake session MUST BE IN OFFICE.

If accepted for therapy may schedule for hiking or in-office sessions as desired.
Insurance Reimburses Depends on insurance plan Depends on insurance plan Depends on insurance plan
EAPs cover (Quest/M&S)

✓

TBD

TBD
Helps you get out of the house!

✓

X

✓

Please contact us today by email or phone to schedule!

 

yaelingh Uncategorized

Women Online: Mental Health Risk

Unsurprisingly, research supports women’s–especially Black women’s–descriptions of their experience of online abuse:

 

 

It’s pretty hard in 2018 to avoid being online, so it can be hard to avoid abusive interactions. This can leave vulnerable people with increased depression, anxiety, and other trauma-related symptoms. Ideally, various platforms would develop better algorithms and reporting mechanisms to limit online abuse. Even more ideally, people would stop being abusive!

Failing that, you need to support your own mental health as best you can:

  • Be mindful of how much time you spend on social media. Take breaks!
  • Find supportive groups / circles / allies to focus on
  • Find supportive, helpful media sources and check in regularly
  • Develop a free “block” or “mute” hand – you don’t owe others your energy, attention, or explanations!
  • Document any threats or threatening communications before they are removed, and report abuse
  • Know that you are NOT crazy–it really is bad!–and you are not alone ❤

 

yaelingh Uncategorized

Mikki Kendall on the Gamification of Hate

It’s one thing to disagree with someone online, perhaps even exchange heated tweets or emails. But the form of bullying that essentially uses crowdsourced harassment as a form of entertainment (“for the lulz”) is especially pernicious: sending threats, piling on, doxxing– the function is terrorism: scaring people into “staying in their place.” Just as in offline harassment, online harassment is disproportionately directed at those occupying marginalized statuses, (which others may not even recognize).

Targeted harassment is not simply about disagreement:

“[Harassers] don’t have to listen to me. They could (as I do) use the tools at their disposal to block everything that annoys them, bores them, or angers them. They could make podcasts, blogs, or videos about their beliefs and leave the people they disagree with alone. If this was about defending some ideal, or espousing some particular ideological difference, then that is exactly what we would be seeing happen.”

Once you’ve been a target for internet harassment, it doesn’t just go away. It can pop up again ad infinitum when you least expect it:

“There is no life after being harassed if you’re a marginalized person speaking up on the internet.”

Read Mikki Kendall’s original essay here.