After My Relationship With My Therapist Stagnated, I Tried Wellnite Online Therapy

Deciding whether to end treatment with your therapist is a lot like trying to decide whether to break up with a partner. You ask yourself, Are things really that bad? Can we talk it out? Have I expressed my concerns? How will they take it? And, most importantly, Will I ever find a new one? 

I started contemplating these questions a few months ago when it became clear that my long-term therapist and I were no longer making considerable progress. I still really liked them, but I wondered whether someone else might be a better fit for me. However, going through the hassle of finding a new therapist seemed not worth the effort. That was when I discovered Wellnite. Wellnite is a platform that provides online therapy and psychiatry. I decided to try its talk therapy program for one month to see if I could find the perfect new therapist for me. 

Unfortunately, none of the therapists I met through Wellnite turned out to be the right match. While this was in part due to bad luck, I felt like the platform's lack of features and clunky operation made a poor outcome nearly inevitable.

How I Signed Up for Wellnite

According to the website, Wellnite’s mission is to provide “accessible high quality mental health care to all regardless of insurance coverage or zip code”—but I was dubious of this from the start. Upon signing up, I filled out the strangest mental health questionnaire I've ever encountered. While some of the questions appeared to be your typical anxiety and depression screening, others left me baffled. One such question was "Have you dealt with any of the following emotional/behavioral problems? Check all that apply:" The options included everything from "drug use" to "stealing" to "repeats words of others" to "immaturity." I have a BA in psychology, but I have no idea whether or not I'm considered immature, and I wasn’t sure how the other list items would help inform my mental health treatment.

Wellnite says it can help with many mental health conditions, including (but not limited to), personality disorders, perinatal mental health disorders, substance use disorders, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). (However, it’s important to note that Wellnite does not prescribe controlled substances, so its psychiatry services can’t address ADHD in the typical way.) Wellnite also claims to be able to address “conditions” less commonly seen in online therapy, such as “homelessness.” So, it made some big promises right from the start that I wasn’t sure it could keep.

Once I signed up, the site gave me access to a dashboard that allowed me to schedule appointments.

There was also a “messages” tab. While this was probably meant as a way for customer service to contact me, I never used it because they always contacted me via text message. (Wellnite doesn’t allow clients to message their providers.) There was a similarly useless notifications tab since appointment reminders were also delivered via text message. 

Scheduling an appointment was an odd task. I went through each therapist the site offered me after I finished the questionnaire via a drop-down menu and saw what times they were available.

I had no idea whether they had any experience interacting with transgender or disabled clients. I later discovered that you can see more information about every single therapist Wellnite employs by visiting its provider page. But because this list includes every therapist working for Wellnite and there is no way to filter by the state(s) in which each therapist is licensed, the page includes far more therapists than I could choose from, making it unwieldy to navigate. This lack of information was disconcerting even though I wasn't seeking care for my so-called "LGBTQ+ issues." I didn't want to end up with a therapist who would misgender me. Hesitantly, I chose the first available therapist for my first week.

Pricing

Wellnite accepts PPO insurance plans. If you will be paying out of pocket, be prepared to be confused. The pricing page has four tabs: biweekly, monthly, annually, and biannually. On the biweekly tab, there's a section stating that you can pay $95 per month, charged bi-weekly, for access to medical care (aka psychiatry) only. Straightforward enough. Then, when I clicked on the “monthly” tab, I was presented with two options: the first offered me access to both psychiatry and therapy for $245 a month, and the second offered access to therapy only, which cost $450 per month. Both plans offer the same number of talk therapy sessions. 

In its own words, Wellnite offers "access to wholesale pricing on any mental health medication & free delivery (free shipping) for a 1 month period." I find this alarming because this made it seem to me like Wellnite only makes money if the psychiatrist prescribes meds, which potentially creates incentives to overprescribe. 

When I clicked on the “annually” tab, I was presented with three options. The first was to pay annually for access to psychiatry only for $61.75 per month (totaling $741). The second involved paying yearly to access both talk therapy and psychiatry for $159.25 per month (totaling $1,911). The final option was talk therapy only for $292.50 per month charged upfront every six months. I was confused by this plan since I was in the "annually" tab. 

I chose the $450/month paid monthly therapy-only plan. Still, I felt like Wellnite’s confusing price plans only serve to make an already difficult-to-navigate mental health system even more inaccessible. 

How Therapy Sessions Work

My time as a Wellnite member did not get any simpler. Throughout the month, I attempted to meet with a total of three different therapists. I had the option of choosing between three different appointment-length options per month: six 30-minute sessions, four 45-minute sessions, or three 60-minute sessions. Although I appreciated the flexibility, I could choose the length of every appointment when scheduling it, and the site had no way of showing me how many appointments of what length I had already attended.

After being reminded several times via text message about my upcoming appointment throughout the week, I clicked on the video chat link on my Wellnite patient portal dashboard two minutes before the appointment. I was then presented with a web page displaying my face on the webcam and inviting me to "knock" on the therapist's digital door. I clicked the button and a message appeared telling me my therapist would be there shortly. I waited. And waited. And waited. They never showed up. 

This occurred on a Saturday. I texted the customer service line who responded saying that they would address the issue by calling me. Monday came and went. As did Tuesday. And Wednesday and Thursday. At this point, I simply scheduled an appointment with the next available therapist and hoped for the best. Fortunately, she showed up within five minutes of the scheduled time of each appointment. Unfortunately, the two of us struggled to connect, but she seemed committed to helping me. She offered to take me through a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to tackle my anxiety and gave me homework each week to help me make progress. CBT is a therapy approach that aims to help patients identify and reframe negative patterns of thinking.

After my second appointment with her, I decided to test out a third therapist to see if she would be a better fit. From the get-go, I loved her friendly disposition and her southern accent. She similarly discussed CBT with me but also showed me strategies during our session that could be used to improve my mood at a moment’s notice. My favorite was one where I had to stare at an object and list the positive qualities of the object in my head without stating what the object was.

Canceling my membership was also a strange process. It required me to fill out an incredibly long online form. The form didn't differentiate between clients who used the psychiatry service and those who didn't, so it asked me several questions about what medication I was on. For example, the form asked me if I was aware of the potential withdrawal effects caused by stopping mental health medications.

In addition, before I could finally cancel my subscription, Wellnite offered me the chance to choose a different plan or pause my subscription for one month instead.

Unfortunately, I forgot to cancel the last appointment with my therapist before ending my subscription. I assumed the appointment would be automatically canceled since I lost access to my account the moment the subscription concluded. However, at the time of that appointment, I received several texts from customer service reminding me to attend. I began to worry about the $65 no-show fee, so I responded explaining that I had already canceled my subscription. My time at Wellnite ended as oddly as it had begun.

Pros and Cons

My experience with Wellnite wasn't ideal due to a disorganized service and lack of LGBTQ-friendly providers. Here are the benefits and drawbacks I found of using the service so that you can evaluate whether it’s right for you.

Final Thoughts

Wellnite is bizarre. The logistical aspects of therapy that virtual services should streamline were in fact made clunky by Wellnite's platform. The service is more financially accessible than many other online therapy services because it accepts insurance, but the pricing plans are confusing, and out-of-pocket pricing can get expensive if you’re looking for a plan that doesn’t include psychiatry. Customer service was easy to contact but unreliable at actually solving the problems relayed to them. The intake form was thorough but included questions that I thought bordered on silly. And, while canceling the service could be done entirely online, it involved answering irrelevant questions about psychiatric treatment I never received. The therapy Wellnite offered me, when I actually received it, seemed decent. I didn't find my perfect therapist through Wellnite, but I met two good ones. If you're looking for mental healthcare, I would advise against Wellnite until the company works out the organizational kinks in service. The company could fulfill its mission to make mental healthcare more accessible given the quality of therapy, but it doesn't appear to have the infrastructure to do so just yet.

As I continue my quest to find the ideal therapist for me, I will use some of the lessons that Wellnite taught me. Practice gratitude. Reflect on my past needs while considering my future ones. And the only way to take care of your mental health is to show up.