Millions Spent, Few Served: Talkspace pledged to expand young people’s access to therapy. Company data shows few were served while the tech platform raked in millions.
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Millions Spent, Few Served: Seattle’s Talkspace Deal for Youth Therapy Falls Short
Amid a mental health crisis, Talkspace pledged to expand young people’s access to therapy. Company data shows few were served while the tech platform raked in millions.
For profit Tech is societal cancer, and I say this while unfortunately stuck in a tech career, stay off of online services like this as much as possible
Reading the article, it seems like the reason few were served is no one signed up for it. And those that did either didn’t click with there therapist, which is a normal thing, you just ask for a new one, or didn’t like the virtual aspect of it. Not sure why I should be outraged at this, so let me know what I am missing.
Well, hopefully you have more emotional options than “confused” and “outraged”, and can manage something sorta in between, or off on a tangent from either of those?
I think the main point the article is highlighting, is that there was a gross miss-spend by the city on this service, based on the data that came out about it. The city bought the company’s marketing pitch that students didn’t want in person services, and that students would greatly prefer to get therapy online / virtually. Data came out showing that to be very inaccurate, and interviews with actual students highlight the point – might’ve been an idea to ask them before hand, but whatever. The more “Eh???” point that the article raises, albeit buried near the end, is that even after such a horribly wasteful investment, the govt is doubling down with this company and offering them more money/contracts.
Like change some company names / products to simplify it – the government paid $1m to a private company to supply burgers to students, believing the company’s claim that thousands of students would eat their burgers. Almost no students went for the burgers, and the few that did generally said the burgers sucked balls. As a result, the government is now giving that same company another pile of money to provide burgers to everyone else, because the company claimed that everyone else will eat their burgers.
Right, the outrage should be directed to these cities for the ridiculous spend along with apparently a lack of promotion of the services. The article, and thus the title here, seems to have a lean towards blaming talkspace for those contracts and not at the city level where it belongs.
The city likely provided the same funding for marketing / outreach as was provided to all the other people who got that contract – and those other places generally performed a lot better than talkspace. If the one variable that changes is the third party contractor, it’s difficult to see how it’s the city’s fault on that front, other than buying in to talkspace’s claims that virtual therapy was a thing kids were clamoring for.
And outrage is still a weird bar to me. Not all news needs to generate outrage. It can be a mundane groan of “ffs, the city’s wasting a bunch of tax payer dollars again on a third party partner that already failed to deliver results… maybe we should vote in new people next time around”.
*edit to note: from a ‘technology’ perspective, it’s also a somewhat interesting article, as it highlights the disconnect between some tech company claims, and reality. Especially in regards to the tech companies claims, and the reality of what the intended users actually want/need.
Maybe the perceived outage is all on me. I will take that and think about it.
Appreciate the thoughtful dialog.
I tried it out when it first became a thing. Both my therapists quit within 3 months of us matching because they were stressed out with the volume of people they were supposed to see. I quit using it after losing the second one. It also cost the same if you saw your therapist bi weekly, weekly, every other week or monthly. So the second therapist tried to move me to once a month after 3 sessions because I was “doing so well.” Bitch you don’t even know me??