Effectiveness despite Limitations
In all candor, there are certain limitations when one chooses to use online mental health therapy despite the ample benefits of lower cost, convenience, and anonymity (in particular for those who experience stigma within their respective culture/sub-culture).
These limitations include a lesser ability to try interactive modalities such as art therapy, family/group therapies, etc. However, the ability to get effective mental therapy with other modalities still exists, allowing many to get the help they need without needing to go to face-to-face therapy.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
This modality primarily focuses on one’s thoughts and how to change them so they no longer affect one’s harmful behavior. It targets the crux of the issue, asking whether these negative thoughts are even valid, or if they are self-manifested issues that are unnecessarily harmful.
If it is deemed to be an unrealistic thought to your present circumstance, the therapist will help you navigate to find new ways and patterns of thinking for not only the current issue, but future issues to begin to better one’s mental health. This therapy is perhaps one of the more popular ones, being effective with depression, OCD, generalized anxiety disorder, general stress, panic disorders, anger issues, social phobia, eating disorders, PTSD, and marital difficulties.
Narrative Therapy
This focuses on individuals who may feel as if their illness and disorder controls their life and have become a prominent part of their identity. Narrative therapy thus focuses on trying to detach them from the patient’s identity, and to remind them that they are not their disorder, but an individual with the disorder.
It seeks to uncover the skills, dreams, and goals the patient has in order to restore their individuality and remind them of the qualities which truly define them, rather than the disorder they perceive to define them. They can do this via a process of having a direct discussion with the patient simply describing a negative experience or problem, followed by more positive stories to remind them of the complex nature of life. It is most effective when treating those with depression and anxiety.
Acceptance-and-Commitment Therapy (ACT)
This is a combination of learning how to change one’s behavior, along with no longer suppressing psychological trauma, but beginning to accept them. It hopes to emphasize mindful behavior, personal values, and actually acting upon changes.
With accepting one’s traumas and changing their behavior to something more optimistic, this allows one to better their emotional state and overall mental health. This is most effective when treating depression, social anxiety, OCD, psychosis, and workplace stress.
Dialectical-Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
This is primarily used to treat Borderline-Personality Disorder (BPD) as it begins to address thinking patterns which deem most situations as dilemmas or very all-or-nothing (such thinking patterns are present within those who suffer from BPD).
DBT seeks to help those manage their emotions better through teaching patients skills to go throughout their regular life and learn how to control their dilemma-like thinking. This way they can begin to live normal lives and have relationships with others which can be harmed when one has BPD.
AYANA Therapy
The modalities above are simply a handful of the offered therapies by our best therapists in USA, where those mentioned are the most prominent within the applications of the therapists we have gotten. We find it imperative to address the uncertainty behind online therapy and apps, and are open to inform and to answer questions regarding the effectiveness of an app serving as a medium to treat mental disorders.
But most importantly, we are here to emphasize why an app is best when it comes to granting access to marginalized communities to mental health services, further explicated in our article “Apps and Anonymity: The Key to Evading Cultural Stigma”. We acknowledge the intricacies to treating mental health, and know simply seeking it is the most important; which is why we know that marginalized communities need our app the most.