Did you know that a large factor affecting clinical outcomes for telemental health work is the therapist’s comfort and familiarity with both the technology and the procedures/protocols being used? In other words, training and deliberate practice have a very big impact on outcomes.
To address this, Person Centered Tech is pleased to present the following collection of articles about online therapy. Click an arrow or title below to see a summary of the article and a link to open it. Person Centered Tech has been publishing free articles on technology in mental health practice since 2012. We also offer a continuing education course on getting started with online therapy, which contains most of these articles. These articles are meant to help kick start your understanding; we also offer a full Telemental Health Certificate Program for a deeper dive into the topic. In addition, we have more convenient and reasonably-priced packages of CE courses on this and other topics.
This first article covers the basics of how to get started doing online therapy. Lots of links are included to help you find your way through the process. 
Mental health professionals learn new therapy modalities and mediums in a variety of ways, and telemental health is simply yet another medium. But do ethical standards or laws require training before we can engage in the practice? This topic is a big source of angst in the telemental health world right now as licensing boards are researching the question all over the United States. 
While most mental health professionals know about the problem of cross-state practice, understanding of the details is often still hazy. This article gives you a deeper look at the legal-ethical issues and guides you in the logistical work necessary to potentially set yourself up to work across state lines. 
It may seem like this article is not applicable to you in your practice, but anyone working with a domestic client who is traveling abroad should think about the legal-ethical issues in international practice. International online therapy means a lot of jurisdictions and complexity, but it’s definitely achievable! 
This article isn’t just about Skype, which most people know is no longer seen as suitable for online therapy. Many mental health professionals don’t know why though, so this article helps you understand what makes a piece of tech acceptable or not acceptable. Standards can change as the environment around us changes, which means this will happen to other software, too! 
We’ve heard many complaints about video software from mental health professionals who’ve had their delicate interventions blocked by chopping or freezing, or who’ve had such a bad connection that they’ve been unable to do online therapy at all. This article helps you troubleshoot these issues, which are most likely caused by problems in the tech setup on the therapist’s end, the client’s end, or both. 
The issue of eye contact over video has long been a hobgoblin for therapists considering the idea of integrating online therapy into their practice. Making eye contact over video is less difficult than it may seem, even though the method may not be obvious at first. This article shows you how!