Hannah Zeavin on Teletherapy at the Psychotherapy Action Network
Hannah Zeavin recently featured as a panelist at PsiAN: Psycotherapy Action Network's live forum: "Teletherapy -- Where do we go from here?". In the forum, Hannah and two other panelists discuss what we've learned about teletherapy during the pandemic, what we can expect in the future, and what we need to think about going forward.
From Hannah on the forum:
"The office has also offered patient and therapist alike a reflective space, seemingly apart from their experiences of the rest of the world. The office allowed patient and therapist to meet in a confidential, secure location, and one extensibly free from the distractions found in work and family. For the last year or so, this defacto and idealized therapeutic place has been unavilable to most mental health care providers and their patients although of course not all because of mandated social distancing which has governed the rest of our lives. Instead, facetime and zoom but also proprietary medical platforms and corporate apps have become the dominant spaces of therapy. These digital means of meeting were often and remain rife with the permeabilities of intended pandemic life - always on life, opposity of childcare, and technointrusion in the form of glitch and bad signal. Individual therapy has, to the minds of many, gone from a beautifully ritualized sanctum to just another digital input. Before the pandemic, teletherapy was a shadow form of mental healthcare. It is not the default. But as vaccinations has risen in the United States, of course barring the delta variant, therapists and patients are increasingly able to consider whether they want to see each other again."
Listen to the entire forum below or here!