A BetterHelp Therapist Allegedly Told a Gay Man to Become Straight – Them
A gay man has alleged that a therapist he found through BetterHelp, an online mental health service platform, encouraged him to repress his sexuality.
A Wednesday report from the Wall Street Journal detailed how 22-year-old Caleb Hill sought a therapist on the online platform after he was kicked out of his house by his conservative parents. He specifically requested an LGBTQ+ therapist, but he was matched with a Christian therapist, Jeffrey Lambert, who Hill says told him, “You sacrifice your family or you sacrifice being gay.”
“I needed someone to tell me I was gay and that was okay,” Hill told the Wall Street Journal. “I got the exact opposite.”
Lambert asked Hill if he had been intimate with a man yet, and when Hill answered that he hadn’t, Hill says that Lambert said, “Good.” “He said if I did want to go back to my family, I should think hard about being physical with a man, because it would be a lot harder after that,” Hill said.
Hill recalls that Lambert then told him that if he “chose to go back to who I was and deny those feelings, he could get me where I needed to be.”
Worrying that Lambert would practice conversion therapy on him, Hill emailed him after the session, saying that he would no longer be able to see him. “I finally opened the door of the prison I built up inside, and the thought of going back kills me,” Hill wrote in the email. “Will kill me if I lock myself inside again.”
BetterHelp employs 29,900 therapists as independent hourly paid contractors, according to Business Insider. Accordingly, a former clinical director said that therapists were “treated like Uber drivers,” per Business Insider.
Both BetterHelp and Lambert declined to comment on Hill’s specific case, but a spokesperson told WSJ that “given the scale of the service, unfortunate and negative experiences are not completely unavoidable. This is true in all therapy settings, whether traditional or online.”
BetterHelp has previously come under fire for its usage of influencers to promote the service, as well as for its handling of patient data.
The implications of Hill’s case, though, are especially worrying considering the precarity of LGBTQ+ mental health, and the fact that many LGBTQ+ people, especially youth, could certainly stand to benefit from cheap, online therapy. BetterHelp has previously claimed, in a 2020 statement to Polygon, that there is “a whole team that makes sure every provider we bring to the platform is fully licensed and in good standing.” However, it’s clear from Hill’s experience that there’s plenty of room for improvement in that regard.
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