Amanda Palleschi profiles blogger-turned-therapist John Kim, whose practice is conducted on a site called The Angry Therapist:
After logging years in L.A. coffee shops working on a screenplay, [Kim] decided to become a licensed therapist. He began a Tumblr blog chronicling career change and post-divorce struggles. One day, a Tumblr follower wrote him an email asking for advice on how to cope with a recent breakup. Kim wrote an insightful email back. The girl followed up, sending Kim an unsolicited $20 bill. Not long after, she became Kim’s very first client, and the site acquired a donation button. The rest is every blogger’s fever dream: He quit his day job, had to start a waiting list of clients, started hiring a team to assist with marketing and product development as well as run his online groups.
Nearly one million page views, over 100 clients and over 3,000 tumblr “followers” later, Kim hopes he is giving talk therapy a needed image tune-up.
[Both patient Charlene] Corpus and Kim say today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings are more open to therapy and self-improvement practices than their parents’ might have been, and that, paired with their tech know-how, could change the market of psychotherapy. A one-on-one Google Hangout session with Kim runs around $90 an hour and group sessions are $25 (like many therapists in brick-and-mortar offices today, Kim does not accept health insurance), but it costs just $9 a month to become a “member” of The Angry Therapist’s “community”: a word Kim uses often when describing the goals of his practice. Clients find Kim online – through their own tumblr blogs, through friends’ referrals on Facebook, through someone posting an Instagram of a quote from his blog. Kim’s clients are all over the U.S. and abroad. They are college kids with eating disorders, young professionals going through breakups and divorces, busy business travelers, even high-class escorts.
Palleschi points out, “Experts believe that 80 to 90 percent of all therapy will be done remotely within 10 years” but therapists like Kim also face unknown regulatory hurdles. Since I moved to New York, almost my entire talk-therapy has been via phone, as it always is when I’m in Provincetown. It works for me, but I’m not sure if it would if I hadn’t spent an intensive amount of time in her office in her presence for several years. Sometimes, especially with issues like transference, you need to be physically with a therapist. But sometimes, depending on the type of therapy, you don’t. I can see the logic of expanding online shrinkage.
The Dish 