Lindsey Weedston
Travis Scott, the rapper and record producer currently under fire for the eight deaths and hundreds of injuries resulting from a massive stage rush at his recent concert, is getting further heat for offering traumatized attendees therapy through a service that does not have the best reputation.
Scott has reportedly offered a free month of “therapy” via BetterHelp to these concert-goers, but former users have lined up to complain about the company, alleging that the counseling they received was of poor quality or even made them feel worse.
One Twitter user even posted screenshots of text conversations with a therapist they found through this service showing perhaps not the best response to a patient saying that something made them suicidal. This user has since set their account to protected mode after their initial tweet went viral.
“I have posted this before but it’s absolutely sickening that Travis Scott is offering a free month of BetterHelp to people likely suffering from PTSD,” Cari wrote. “This is the quality of care you get on @betterhelp from therapists who are underpaid and overburdened with absurd caseloads.”
BetterHelp purports to increase access to mental health services, which can be very difficult to find outside of major metropolitan areas and tends to be prohibitively expensive without good insurance, by allowing people 24/7 access to counselors and therapists online. People can speak with these individuals via text message, online chat, phone, video conferencing, or message board.
While it sounds convenient, BetterHelp has already faced widespread criticism from former users and others familiar with the app. In 2018, the company was hit by a wave of bad press after their name was spread far and wide via YouTube ads and the media personalities allowing those ads learned from their fans about all the complaints facing the service.
One of the main problems people had with the app was the clear push by the company to claim that they hired qualified professionals in the field of mental health while their terms of service seemed to say the opposite:
“We do not control the quality of the Counselor Services and we do not determine whether any Counselor is qualified to provide any specific service as well as whether a Counselor is categorized correctly or matched correctly to you,” the ToS used to read according to a story in Polygon. Their terms have since been changed to outline the actual qualifications, education, and experience allegedly required by BetterHelp.
People also complained that the company was hiring actors to give it good reviews, pricing issues, selling user data to Facebook, offering severely low pay to people with Master’s degrees, and general bad experiences. Some mental health professionals who have tried to app themselves or simply looked into it have condemned the entire model as being inadequate for treatment for something as complex as the inner workings of the human brain.
It seems that not all or possibly none of these issues have been resolved other than the ToS change, with some saying the app helped them but others complaining about therapists who were unhelpful and uncaring or worse. Scott is further being accused of grabbing a sponsorship deal out of a preventable tragedy by partnering with BetterHelp, profiting off of people’s death and trauma rather than taking steps to make sure people don’t die at his shows anymore.