7 ms·

The company has a very generous mental health policy. 25 free counseling sessions a year. They're supposed to be for short term use. However, I heard a separate

The company has a very generous mental health policy. 25 free counseling sessions a year. They're supposed to be for short term use. However, I heard a separate complaint that none of the available counselors were African American and thus wouldn't understand the employee's specific issue.

lisper 7y ago
As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think. People have this idea that the counseling process is analogous to a medical procedure: you go to the doctor, describe the problem, they diagnose you, and prescribe an intervention. That is not generally how it works. There is a little bit of that on occasion, but mostly counseling works simply through the process of rendering your feelings into words in the presence of another human being who is listening to you but in whom you are not emotionally invested and who is not emotionally invested in you. That, in and of itself, turns out to be tremendously helpful. (The same mechanism is in play in other kinds of human activities as well, like book clubs, writers groups, or religious gatherings.) You don't have to be black to learn how to provide this service to someone who is.
- voxl 7y ago
  Nothing you said is relevant if the person will refuse council if they percieve it to be from someone who won't be able to understand their issues.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    But it is ironic that someone would seek therapy to cope with a racist world, and but refuse service based on the race of the therapist.
  - lisper 7y ago
    Well, sure, but that's on them. The belief that a counselor will not be able to help you, for whatever reason, will generally be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I see no salient difference between a black person deciding that a white person can't help them because they are white, and a white person deciding that a black person can't help them because they are black. To me, both of those positions are equally odious. One thing I've learned first-hand over the years is that you can't help someone who won't help themselves.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Genuine question: Are women who have been abused by men odious for seeking female therapists?
      - reitanqild 7y ago
        FWIW lisper mentioned that in another subthread at about the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718590
- nostrademons 7y ago
  You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though. While it's true that counseling is more about fixing yourself than having someone fix you, the process doesn't work if you aren't willing to open up in the first place.
  - lisper 7y ago
    > You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though. Yes, but you need to trust them as a professional, not as a personal confidante who shares your life experience.
- rictic 7y ago
  In my experience, if the patient does not have a certain level of rapport with the counselor, the effectiveness is greatly reduced because neither party can be confident that they're effectively communicating. Communicating across cultural barriers is more difficult and lower bandwidth.
  - lisper 7y ago
    See this comment and my response to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718444
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  However, this relies on the ability of the person issuing the treatment to provide the appropriate amount of response to the person making the problems into words. If I talked about my (hypothetical) child abuse to a psychologist and the psychologist began engaging in therapeutic techniques to normalize the abuse I would be extremely offended and likely come out worse for wear. If I, a person of color, am having emotional difficulty processing the anxiety I feel about police persecution after being exposed to information that my race is being disproportionately persecuted, I really need a healthcare professional that (at the very least) has knowledge on when to engage in trying to direct me from my anxieties vs acknowledging that I am experiencing a normal amount of anxiety for the situation. Part of this may in fact be wanting a healthcare professional who is of my race because I have been harmed in the past by professionals who did not share my race practicing inappropriate treatments on me. Similarly, there are plenty of female patients that ask for a female doctor, even in non-therapy medicine, because plenty of medication, illnesses, etc. show differently for women.
  - lisper 7y ago
    That's a fair point, but I'd argue that gender differences and racial differences are, well, different. There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs. If you judge a prospective counselor by the color of their skin you are IMHO part of the problem. This is not to say that you shouldn't judge a counselor by their behavior after you've started working with them. But I think it's possible for a person with black skin to be just as insensitive to the concerns of black people as someone with white skin, e.g. Clarence Thomas.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      "There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs." But doesn't that mean race can potentially become extremely important when the treatment is via a form of structural socialization?
    - 7y ago
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think. That probably depends on what kind of “counselor” is involved; the same term can be used to refer to a variety of to licensed mental health professionals or to people who are basically peer counselors with minimal specialized education. The latter is relying very heavily on their own lives experience, so it clearly matters. Even for the professionals, psychological safety of client with the counselor is going to be a significant factor, and someone who is coming from a place of perceived pervasive hostility and neglect from outside of their own racial group that leaves them metaphorically curled up in a ball of fear and silence around people outside their race is going to be hard for someone who triggers that reaction in them to help.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  Business idea: Machine learning drives a realistic video and audio avatar of a human therapist to ask occasional "How does that make you feel" type questions. As part of the session the therapist asks you to rate a few different categories of your mental life (e.g. "How content are you with your life/relationships/family/future on a scale of 1 to 5?) The ratings then can be used for data to develop better questions and techniques and marketing claims (people with 1 or more Virtual Therapy seasons a week experience an X% improvement in indicators of mental health). Subscription model: 10 bucks a month gets two one hour virtual therapy sessions a week.
  - vageli 7y ago
    This concept is explored in ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game)
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/doctor/ https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/doctor/
  - hindsightbias 7y ago
    Keep it simple: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE
- Semaphor 7y ago
  From my personal experience, I can agree with "personal experience" not mattering as much. But on the other hand, I received counseling as a teenager and my first counselor wasn’t a good fit for me at all (while my dad loved him) and I switched to another. I can imagine a black person having a harder time connecting to a non-black psychiatrist.
- qzx_pierri 7y ago
  I agree. I'm a black man, and my counselor is an older white woman. She completely changed my life, helped me build self esteem, and taught me why doing what the ex-Google employee does is a bad idea (reading tons of negative news, and stressing myself out over issues bigger than I am). There are certain things that she can't relate to, but the root of all emotional healing is becoming a better person overall. It sounds like this guy spends way too much time on Twitter/Tumblr (Twitter is essentially Tumblr circa 2013 since everyone left their porn blogs behind). America is definitely racist still. I experience suspect shit from white people all the time, but I don't let it bother me because I don't have the power to change anyone. It sounds like this guy doesn't realize that you can't live a healthy life (mentally) and non-ironically be radical about certain social issues IRL. > Where are you headed, [REDACTED]?” another teammate asked with an innocuous timbre as the restof our pod curiously awaited my response. He even acknowledges the fact that they weren't purposely being mean or anything, they just don't understand how the ex-Googler is feeling. I'm not taking up for his co-workers, but I bet if he spoke up in a chill way, they would've corrected themselves and explained what they really meant. But instead, the ex-Googler drops his head, leaves the office, and writes a slander essay like a passive aggressive little [redacted]. To wrap this up: Yes, there are some fucked up cops out there who are shooting unarmed black men, but the majority of cops aren't terrible people, and expecting privileged white people to understand us is counter-productive. White people will NEVER understand how it feels to be a black man in this country, and it's not worth trying to explain it. All we can do is be the best we can be, and hope the kindness, smiles, and compassion are reciprocated. If not, fuck em.
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    I think that's a healthy outlook. It's not your job to educate your coworkers. Though, I think people should feel ok discussing it. The idea that white people would "never" understand is a little bit much, but it's not going to be an easy conversation. This is the type of thing that you are only going to change minds about by methodical teaching. Honestly, I don't recommend it, unless this is a friend of yours that you want to maintain for a long time, and think it's worth investing the effort for the long term health of the friendship.
  - repolfx 7y ago
- hos234 7y ago
  I disagree. I personally get cheesed off with psychologists and counselors who I don't feel a connect with. Imho best one's are those that know what is involved in creating an empathetic connection. Sport psychologists are much more interesting to me in that sense cause they can't pretend not to be invested in the person or the team winning.
_nhynes 7y ago
> none of the available counselors were African American Respectfully, are you sure you didn’t mean “Black?” “African American” doesn’t accurately capture e.g., Caribbean and Latin American identities.
- cellularmitosis 7y ago
  The specific issues the OP referenced were police brutality in the US against blacks, so I would assume he specifically meant African American.
- ASinclair 7y ago
  Maybe Black is a better choice in this case? Sorry, I'm a bit ignorant as to the precise nuances of identity that this person felt were important here.
  - _nhynes 7y ago
    Sorry I didn’t mean to phrase it as directed at you. It was supposed to be a general statement with context. I suppose I could also do to watch my own language :)

lisper 7y ago

As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think. People have this idea that the counseling process is analogous to a medical procedure: you go to the doctor, describe the problem, they diagnose you, and prescribe an intervention. That is not generally how it works. There is a little bit of that on occasion, but mostly counseling works simply through the process of rendering your feelings into words in the presence of another human being who is listening to you but in whom you are not emotionally invested and who is not emotionally invested in you. That, in and of itself, turns out to be tremendously helpful. (The same mechanism is in play in other kinds of human activities as well, like book clubs, writers groups, or religious gatherings.) You don't have to be black to learn how to provide this service to someone who is.

voxl 7y ago
Nothing you said is relevant if the person will refuse council if they percieve it to be from someone who won't be able to understand their issues.
- jldugger 7y ago
  But it is ironic that someone would seek therapy to cope with a racist world, and but refuse service based on the race of the therapist.
- lisper 7y ago
  Well, sure, but that's on them. The belief that a counselor will not be able to help you, for whatever reason, will generally be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I see no salient difference between a black person deciding that a white person can't help them because they are white, and a white person deciding that a black person can't help them because they are black. To me, both of those positions are equally odious. One thing I've learned first-hand over the years is that you can't help someone who won't help themselves.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Genuine question: Are women who have been abused by men odious for seeking female therapists?
    - reitanqild 7y ago
      FWIW lisper mentioned that in another subthread at about the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718590
nostrademons 7y ago
You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though. While it's true that counseling is more about fixing yourself than having someone fix you, the process doesn't work if you aren't willing to open up in the first place.
- lisper 7y ago
  > You do need to trust and have a rapport with the counselor, though. Yes, but you need to trust them as a professional, not as a personal confidante who shares your life experience.
rictic 7y ago
In my experience, if the patient does not have a certain level of rapport with the counselor, the effectiveness is greatly reduced because neither party can be confident that they're effectively communicating. Communicating across cultural barriers is more difficult and lower bandwidth.
- lisper 7y ago
  See this comment and my response to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718444
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
However, this relies on the ability of the person issuing the treatment to provide the appropriate amount of response to the person making the problems into words. If I talked about my (hypothetical) child abuse to a psychologist and the psychologist began engaging in therapeutic techniques to normalize the abuse I would be extremely offended and likely come out worse for wear. If I, a person of color, am having emotional difficulty processing the anxiety I feel about police persecution after being exposed to information that my race is being disproportionately persecuted, I really need a healthcare professional that (at the very least) has knowledge on when to engage in trying to direct me from my anxieties vs acknowledging that I am experiencing a normal amount of anxiety for the situation. Part of this may in fact be wanting a healthcare professional who is of my race because I have been harmed in the past by professionals who did not share my race practicing inappropriate treatments on me. Similarly, there are plenty of female patients that ask for a female doctor, even in non-therapy medicine, because plenty of medication, illnesses, etc. show differently for women.
- lisper 7y ago
  That's a fair point, but I'd argue that gender differences and racial differences are, well, different. There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs. If you judge a prospective counselor by the color of their skin you are IMHO part of the problem. This is not to say that you shouldn't judge a counselor by their behavior after you've started working with them. But I think it's possible for a person with black skin to be just as insensitive to the concerns of black people as someone with white skin, e.g. Clarence Thomas.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    "There really are salient biological differences between males and females, whereas the differences between blacks and whites, while real, are purely social constructs." But doesn't that mean race can potentially become extremely important when the treatment is via a form of structural socialization?
  - 7y ago
dragonwriter 7y ago
> As someone who has been through counseling, and with two immediate family members who are professional psychologists, I can tell you that "understanding someone's specific issue" doesn't matter nearly as much as one might think. That probably depends on what kind of “counselor” is involved; the same term can be used to refer to a variety of to licensed mental health professionals or to people who are basically peer counselors with minimal specialized education. The latter is relying very heavily on their own lives experience, so it clearly matters. Even for the professionals, psychological safety of client with the counselor is going to be a significant factor, and someone who is coming from a place of perceived pervasive hostility and neglect from outside of their own racial group that leaves them metaphorically curled up in a ball of fear and silence around people outside their race is going to be hard for someone who triggers that reaction in them to help.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ALittleLight 7y ago
Business idea: Machine learning drives a realistic video and audio avatar of a human therapist to ask occasional "How does that make you feel" type questions. As part of the session the therapist asks you to rate a few different categories of your mental life (e.g. "How content are you with your life/relationships/family/future on a scale of 1 to 5?) The ratings then can be used for data to develop better questions and techniques and marketing claims (people with 1 or more Virtual Therapy seasons a week experience an X% improvement in indicators of mental health). Subscription model: 10 bucks a month gets two one hour virtual therapy sessions a week.
- vageli 7y ago
  This concept is explored in ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game)
- dllthomas 7y ago
  https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/doctor/ https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/doctor/
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  Keep it simple: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE
Semaphor 7y ago
From my personal experience, I can agree with "personal experience" not mattering as much. But on the other hand, I received counseling as a teenager and my first counselor wasn’t a good fit for me at all (while my dad loved him) and I switched to another. I can imagine a black person having a harder time connecting to a non-black psychiatrist.
qzx_pierri 7y ago
I agree. I'm a black man, and my counselor is an older white woman. She completely changed my life, helped me build self esteem, and taught me why doing what the ex-Google employee does is a bad idea (reading tons of negative news, and stressing myself out over issues bigger than I am). There are certain things that she can't relate to, but the root of all emotional healing is becoming a better person overall. It sounds like this guy spends way too much time on Twitter/Tumblr (Twitter is essentially Tumblr circa 2013 since everyone left their porn blogs behind). America is definitely racist still. I experience suspect shit from white people all the time, but I don't let it bother me because I don't have the power to change anyone. It sounds like this guy doesn't realize that you can't live a healthy life (mentally) and non-ironically be radical about certain social issues IRL. > Where are you headed, [REDACTED]?” another teammate asked with an innocuous timbre as the restof our pod curiously awaited my response. He even acknowledges the fact that they weren't purposely being mean or anything, they just don't understand how the ex-Googler is feeling. I'm not taking up for his co-workers, but I bet if he spoke up in a chill way, they would've corrected themselves and explained what they really meant. But instead, the ex-Googler drops his head, leaves the office, and writes a slander essay like a passive aggressive little [redacted]. To wrap this up: Yes, there are some fucked up cops out there who are shooting unarmed black men, but the majority of cops aren't terrible people, and expecting privileged white people to understand us is counter-productive. White people will NEVER understand how it feels to be a black man in this country, and it's not worth trying to explain it. All we can do is be the best we can be, and hope the kindness, smiles, and compassion are reciprocated. If not, fuck em.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  I think that's a healthy outlook. It's not your job to educate your coworkers. Though, I think people should feel ok discussing it. The idea that white people would "never" understand is a little bit much, but it's not going to be an easy conversation. This is the type of thing that you are only going to change minds about by methodical teaching. Honestly, I don't recommend it, unless this is a friend of yours that you want to maintain for a long time, and think it's worth investing the effort for the long term health of the friendship.
- repolfx 7y ago
hos234 7y ago
I disagree. I personally get cheesed off with psychologists and counselors who I don't feel a connect with. Imho best one's are those that know what is involved in creating an empathetic connection. Sport psychologists are much more interesting to me in that sense cause they can't pretend not to be invested in the person or the team winning.

_nhynes 7y ago

> none of the available counselors were African American Respectfully, are you sure you didn’t mean “Black?” “African American” doesn’t accurately capture e.g., Caribbean and Latin American identities.

cellularmitosis 7y ago
The specific issues the OP referenced were police brutality in the US against blacks, so I would assume he specifically meant African American.
ASinclair 7y ago
Maybe Black is a better choice in this case? Sorry, I'm a bit ignorant as to the precise nuances of identity that this person felt were important here.
- _nhynes 7y ago
  Sorry I didn’t mean to phrase it as directed at you. It was supposed to be a general statement with context. I suppose I could also do to watch my own language :)