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Our company has a therapist

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Re: Our company has a therapist

#31

Post by cbd1984 »

DanBC wrote: post #14
tunesmith wrote: post #3

This sounds pretty dangerous - even if the executives of a company claim that it is confidential, why should the employees believe it? Therapists talk about their patients in a very general sense all the time, and even if they don't, an employer is going to want to have some idea of how the therapist's job is going. In a small company, it would be far too easy to put two and two together, and then react in a way that…

The company is in the UK so there are laws governing use of information. Hopefully the company chose a BACP registered therapist and so that therapist will be covered by their registration rules too.

> The company is in the UK so there are laws governing use of information.

Are there laws against invading privacy via subverting cell phones in the UK? Did it happen?

Re: Our company has a therapist

#32

Post by [deleted] »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #23

I was sceptical when I read the headline. For one thing, employees may not believe the confidentiality. For another, if only a few people attend, and then office is in the building, these visits aren't all that confidential. But it looks as if that's not a problem because so many employees are actually using this service. So the benefits seem to outweigh: More employees are seeing "any" therapist at all, they are tak…

[deleted]

Re: Our company has a therapist

#33

Post by dang »

zalzane wrote: post #22
swagmeister wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude this is pretty heavy for Hacker News. I hope nobody can recover this guy's identity

it was heavy enough to get deleted by the mods good job covering your ass, ycombi

> it was heavy enough to get deleted by the mods

Of course we didn't touch that post. By the way, whenever you see "[deleted]" it means the submitter deleted it, or (in rare cases) asked us to do so after the editing window had expired.

Edit: I checked the logs just to make sure this wasn't some weird exception. It was definitely deleted by the author.

I'm going to detach this subthread and mark it off-topic now.

Re: Our company has a therapist

#34

Post by ribotmaximus »

detaro wrote: post #28
zalzane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was heavy enough to get deleted by the mods good job covering your ass, ycombi

How can you tell it was deleted by ycombinator and not by the user him-/herself?

I can confirm that neither Jerome or l deleted any post. Great to see a discussion about mental health on HN!

Re: Our company has a therapist

#35

Post by jeromeribot »

tunesmith wrote: post #3

This sounds pretty dangerous - even if the executives of a company claim that it is confidential, why should the employees believe it? Therapists talk about their patients in a very general sense all the time, and even if they don't, an employer is going to want to have some idea of how the therapist's job is going. In a small company, it would be far too easy to put two and two together, and then react in a way that…

They can believe it because as I sat in bed thinking how much talking to someone in confidence has helped me, I thought that maybe others might be able to benefit from the same feeling. I have absolutely no interest in what is discussed in these sessions, just that they happen at all, if people are interested in doing so.

I disagree about the point that trusting in a company-hired therapist makes one feel less comfortable than confiding in HR. If I broke up with my girlfriend, I'd hope that the confidential conversations had with a trained therapist would prove more fruitful than a conversation with HR.

I came up with this idea because it helped me, and not primarily because it is best for the company. I care enough about the people I work with that I'm happy to support a free service that might help others too, if they want it.

Thanks for the comments. It's an interesting issue that remains an important subject not just for companies, but society in general.

Jerome

Re: Our company has a therapist

#36

Post by VLM »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #24
DanBC wrote: post #11

I've spoken to a bunch of people at different companies. Their companies provide confidential talking therapies through an occupational health service. A lot of people I spoke to said they would be unlikely to use that service because they wanted a clear seperation between health care and employment. That unease didn't totally go even when the talking therapy was an external service bought in by the employing company…

If someone is already willing to go to an external therapist, then that's good. If not, a company therapist may be a good first start.

I like your analysis of the situation and propose its similarity to the popular "health care fair" that large companies periodically have, where benefits providers come in to various conference rooms for a lunch hour event. They won't treat your blood pressure or cholesterol level or do an actual wellness checkup but they'll do trivial screening tests and sign you up for follow up appointments, or find you a primary care GP or whatever technical medical benefit stuff you'd like to talk about. They exclude all billing discussion probably to prevent outright riots (For non-USA people, medical billing is totally screwed up in the USA). There seems no reason not to include mental health providers as part of the existing health care fairs. Some fairs probably do include mental health care providers.

Re: Our company has a therapist

#37

Post by mturmon »

penprogg wrote: post #6

I would never go to a company therapist. Go out and pay for one yourself. There is a clear conflict of interest for the therapist and while they may seem to be nice it's not worth the risk.

It depends on the problem. Of course, "I compulsively steal from my office" wouldn't be a good candidate.

But suppose it has to do with the serious illness of a parent, or the passing of a friend or family member. There are plenty of situations where the issue may not be volatile relative to workplace concerns, but still worth talking to a therapist.

One other thing to consider is that a workplace-specific therapist may be tuned in to the specific ways engineers deal with problems. I was at an info-session where my own workplace therapist was talking about the ways tech people cope, vs. the ways entertainment industry people cope. It's very different, according to him: compartmentalize and keep going vs. substance abuse.

Re: Our company has a therapist

#38

Post by ribotmaximus »

natrius wrote: post #15
tunesmith wrote: post #3

This sounds pretty dangerous - even if the executives of a company claim that it is confidential, why should the employees believe it? Therapists talk about their patients in a very general sense all the time, and even if they don't, an employer is going to want to have some idea of how the therapist's job is going. In a small company, it would be far too easy to put two and two together, and then react in a way that…

While employees should definitely get their own therapists, I'm not sure it's a bad idea for a company to offer one for free while encouraging them to find their own. Removing the barrier to entry and the stigma by making it a standard thing might be worth doing. Then again, if there are insurance plans that have this sort of thing in mind, making that plan standard and encouraging people to use it sounds better.

You touch upon a couple of very important points here - removing barriers and the stigma.

What we're trying to do here is just provide a completely independent person to talk to. They're able to talk to them about anything and everything and none of that information will come back to the employers. Why do this then? By offering this, people are able to work out/unravel any problems/goals/challenges they've got. The hopeful result is that this private chat will then provide a focus, a decision and a more fulfilled human.

Re: Our company has a therapist

#40

Post by VLM »

nraynaud wrote: post #18

I had some troubles with an employee of mine in the past and think he would have benefitted from a shrink (I suspect he was heavily depressed), but as the boss, I found it complicated to do that for various reasons: 1) conflict of interest 2) free will of the patient to go there 3) we're bordering on medical territory and it's a minefield for a company. There is no happy ending, I left the company without having acte…

Sounds like a stereotypical startup opportunity, a problem exists, hard to solve, outsource the minefield to a TaaS (therapy as a service) provider to rake in some corporate contract money.

I don't think its totally out of class as a startup idea, fundamentally you've got a matchmaking service (more or less) and a scheduling system and a billing system and maybe do it online in video conference or something. How to monetize is not entirely clear. I guess you could bill the company one full "screening" therapy hour per year living off the skim of not every employee using the entire hour and most people having a mandatory ten minute talk along the lines of "all is well" annually or whatever while some people end up taking the whole hour (or more?). This is probably not the only possible business model and probably not the only monetization model but it is the first one I thought of. I used dental services as a model for my theoretical therapy model, hang out on a regular basis with the dentist for a short appointment and most of the time he has very little to do for most of the people, but he can schedule a follow up for real work or a referral if the checkup finds a problem.

I suppose there would be interesting conflict of interest issues where the insurance company paying the therapy bills would probably prefer more unhealthy untreated people for financial reasons so they'd actively discourage hiring a company-wide screening service like this. Or, if it can be proven numerically that early diagnosis saves treatment dollars, I think we have an obvious endgame strategy of being bought out by a (mental) health insurance company.

Like most startups the idea is free and not worth much, it'll all be in the execution. It would be interesting to research the competition, the successes, and the failures. It seems like an obvious idea, the past must be full of failures in this field?

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