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0 pointsNoZebra120vClip2y ago0 comments

If somebody's executive dysfunction is preventing them from going through the basic steps needed to get help for that very thing, then they seriously need to enlist the help of either a family member or a professional who can walk them through this and ensure that they succeed.

I'm not sure what the implication of this comment was, but hopefully it does not imply that "if my executive dysfunction prevents me from seeing a real professional then I'll press buttons on my phone and see a fake one instead", because that's a horrible life choice. Complete inaction would be significantly less harmful in a case like that.

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derefr2y ago

> If somebody's executive dysfunction is preventing them from going through the basic steps needed to get help for that very thing, then they seriously need to enlist the help of either a family member or a professional who can walk them through this and ensure that they succeed.

You just said the same thing over again. How do you expect them to "enlist the help of a professional"? That's the whole (complex, multi-step) goal they're pursuing here!

(And, for many such people, they have no supportive family members. They live on their own, do the bare minimum each day at work, drag themselves home, microwave a TV dinner, and fall asleep. Think of them as "a car that doesn't have enough gas in the tank to drive to a gas station.")

> I'm not sure what the implication of this comment was

That lowering the barriers (and thus amount of willpower required) to get yourself initially introduced to someone who can help you with your problems even a little — even if they're not going to be able to help you really well with your problems — is valuable, because being helped even a little now means you have more willpower, that you can then use to access a higher-barrier-to-entry solution, and so on, in a cycle, incrementally bootstrapping your way to fully addressing your problem.

For an analogous situation: group therapy for gender dysphoria is hard to access. Web forums full of trans people you can talk to are easy to access. Those forums aren't structured to help you in the way that group therapy is, but it can at least help you overcome a crisis about whether you should acknowledge that you have a need that requires addressing in the first place.

Whether or not any particular approach or service that lowers barriers to accessing help, is good at doing that, should not be used to condemn the act of lowering barriers to accessing help itself. Just because BetterHelp is worse than nothing, doesn't mean that we should accept "nothing"; the barriers-to-access are still a problem to be solved, and we should still encourage people and companies who set out to try to solve it.