Cathy Brown has fifteen years of experience in the health and wellness field. She has taught yoga, breath work and meditation and is a certified Trauma Support Specialist. She has hosted numerous wellness retreats and is currently the director of Foxlily Farm, where she is creating a residential healing center for previously trafficked women.
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After trying online therapy off and on for the past year, I have started to feel like it might not be the most effective way to support my mental health. I’m a very impatient person who knows what specific issues I want help with. I’ve found it usually takes me at least three sessions before I feel like my therapist has become familiar enough with me and my concerns to offer helpful insights. But that meant spending a couple of weeks and hundreds of dollars to get to that point. I realized I was looking more for on-the-spot tools that would not set me back so much financially.
Therapy Wasn’t Providing Strategies to Manage My Mental Health, So I Tried the Real App
I’d recently heard about this new mental health app called Real that offered therapist-created tools and what the app calls therapist-led “events,” which are essentially virtual group therapy sessions you can participate in with your camera on or https://kissbrides.com/fi/blogi/dominikaaniset-treffisivustot-ja-sovellukset/ off (and your name revealed or kept private). The Real team is led by licensed mental health providers, including Nina Vasan, MD, a psychiatrist and founder/executive director of Stanford University’s Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation, and Rachel Hoffman, PhD, author of Dating and Mating in a Techno-Driven World.
The app is basically a vast library of audio talks given by licensed therapists, all of whom have detailed bios on the website. Each talk offers evidence-based guidance and practical techniques you can use to navigate various issues in your day-to-day life. Topics include things like burnout, body image, setting boundaries, or navigating relationships.
Though I was initially skeptical about how much an app could truly affect my mental health, I was excited to try it out, especially considering the expertise of the app’s creators. And given that a year of Real costs less than one online therapy appointment, I felt I didn’t have much to lose.
How I Started Using the App
Downloading the Real app on my iPhone was straightforward-the app is also available for Android. However, the app was so new that I had to wait before I could use it. Even though I was able to download it to my phone, every time I tried to sign up in the app it told me it wasn’t quite ready to accept memberships yet. Finally, in it allowed me to sign up for a membership and start accessing content.
To access app content, I had to sign up for membership, which cost $165 per year or $24 per month (it could be canceled anytime). I would have preferred some sort of free trial to get a better feel for what I was paying for, but considering I had been shelling out hundreds of dollars a month for online therapy, $24 did not seem like much. The reviews I had read online were all positive, so that helped my decision.
After signing up for membership, I was then prompted to fill out a questionnaire, which I was told would take less than five minutes. The first question was about what topics I would like to explore. I chose body image, family dynamics, and dating and breakups, but other options included who I am, parenting, LGBTQ+ identity, substances, friendships, purpose, work-life balance, etc. It then asked me to share which feelings I wanted to explore: joy, sadness, anxiety, fatigue, grief, or anger. I chose anxiety.
