However, Michael soon discovered that a few days after the session, his therapist would upload a video containing content uncomfortably related to what they talked about. Are you using me for inspiration?'” he says. “It makes me rethink myself when I go to my next session.” He never confronted his therapist about it, and stopped seeing them after six months.
Therapists also face the negative effects of publishing their work online. Posted in August 2022 by one of his licensed counselors, Shabree Rawls (or @unusuallybree on TikTok). video In response to an article on the rise of single men, she told the man to go to therapy. She was receiving backlash after another therapist, her Ilene Glance (under the handle @sidequesttherapy), complained about her client’s “trauma dumping” after posting on TikTok. After a wave of negative comments, harassing phone calls, and her one-star review for her personal practice, she deleted her TikTok account.
Ella White, a counseling psychologist in training at the University of Manchester, kept waiting for social media ethics to show up in her training, but it didn’t. I decided to use my dissertation to interview other therapists about their attitudes towards social media use.
In her opinion, the guidelines are not comprehensive enough, leave interpretation too much to the therapists themselves, and do not address what is considered inappropriate use. Not suitable for an ever-changing reality. “This makes it difficult to create guidelines that aren’t as vague as current recommendations and specific enough to feel like rules, and they become obsolete,” she says. Plus, if you’re too strict, you risk intimidating your therapist into using social media altogether. It’s perhaps not surprising that therapists have trouble navigating boundaries online, says White. If not, it does not necessarily mean that there is an impact.
White is researching what better guidelines might look like and how to disseminate them. To raise awareness of the issues therapists may face and to provide guidance on what they can do in these situations, she shares the types of ethical dilemmas therapists can encounter on social media. To this end, White suggests that those who create the guidelines should actually talk to psychologists and hear what their experiences and concerns and fears are. We believe that more time should be spent on it.
One of the most successful therapists and influencers is Jeff Guenther, better known on TikTok as @TherapyJeff. His 18 months into the pandemic, his Guenther, a Portland-based licensed counselor, found the topic of mental health “really trending.” His passion for combating mental health stigma combined with his feeling that content creation looks like fun led him to start posting on his TikTok in September 2021. But then his fourth, “His 5 Questions to Ask Your Therapist Right Now,” went viral. “And the rest was history.”
