Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
Kip looks like the Forward Health of mental health. @erinfrey, what's the typical experience for someone who tries therapy for the first time? What is the offline experience like after the first session?
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Erin Frey
@erinfrey
@kunalslab Hi Kunal, thanks for checking us out! That's a really common question–so much so that I decided to start blogging about my own Kip experience to share what therapy is like:
https://medium.com/kip-blog/anxi...
This is the experience of therapy on Kip (and we think, any great therapy experience).
#1. FIRST SESSION
The first thing you do with a therapist is set a goal for therapy. This usually happens in the first session (or it can take a couple to figure it out). The first session is a lot of getting to know you and sharing how you are feeling and what's bothering you, so that you and your therapist can figure out that goal (or goals).
#2. FUTURE SESSIONS
In subsequent sessions, you learn about how your mind works, your thought patterns, behaviors, and the emotions that have been coming up for you recently. We sometimes say that a therapist is an expert at debugging your brain. They help you figure out what thoughts, feelings, and behaviors help you and which ones are blocking you from living the life you want. Then, they go about helping you make positive changes. In sessions you'll work with your therapist to learn skills build tools to help you relate to your thoughts differently, build behaviors that support your goals, and learn to navigate your feelings.
#3. BETWEEN SESSIONS
Between sessions, you practice the skills you learned with your therapist, start building new behaviors, and start to track your thoughts and feelings. You use the Kip app to track your mood, other symptoms that you have, and whatever other things you and your therapist talked about doing between sessions. You also have space to take notes about relevant experiences/thoughts you have that you want to share with your therapist or things you want to remember discuss in your next session. This information is all shared privately between you and your therapist.
#4. HOW YOU USE KIP IN SESSIONS
At the beginning of sessions, your therapist and you will look over whatever you shared in the Kip app together. This gives them insight into how your whole week was, not just the one hour that they spend with you, and means you spend less time updating your therapist in session and more time working together. You'll also look at symptom changes and progress over time–we measure this with self-report surveys you take once every week or two. You can see a picture of what this graph looks like in the post below.
P.S. Here's a post that precedes the one above on my decision to go to therapy: https://medium.com/kip-blog/foun...
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Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@erinfrey thanks for the detailed response! Going through your Medium posts now. This one caught my eye too! https://medium.com/kip-blog/foun...
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