NewsBubbles caught up with Roger Aguiar (MA, LLPC,) the owner of CounselingWorld, LLC.; the company which owns the website. We interviewed him in a free video session he offered us from his site. Dr. Aguiar has been providing mental health counseling for over 9 years and says that he got the idea when he "saw the need for a better and easier way to provide his services online." He realized that there was nobody doing this and started the long road to development of a new web application that we got to play with.
The basic features of the system allow a mental health provider or someone who's seeking a provider online to connect and schedule video counseling sessions. The cool part is that it provides a full payment system through PayPal to facilitate the transactions allowing the provider to have full control over how much she makes. Their providers cover a wide range of fields of mental health and there are communities for these fields with chat rooms and message boards so there's a common meeting ground. CounselingWorld also gets into the matching game with a basic and advanced provider matching system that provided us the most qualified counselor to get in contact with based off of what we told them in our signup information.
We were able to contact the counselor through the secure CounselingWorld.com messaging system and although we did not buy a session with him, he responded quite quickly and his profile automatically told us when he was available to do a session with us. Dr. Aguiar mentioned that the system is ready to go big and that the beta testing and idea in general was well received by the mental health community. There was an overall feeling of excitement in the virtual air (cyber air?). He said that one of the greatest innovations this site provides for people seeking counseling is that "they don't have to even leave their homes anymore. This allows providers to reach people, who were until now, unreachable by the mental health community on a face to face level." When we asked him about the social networking features of the site, he had this to say:
"We offer the main features that people like about social networks, provider blogs, profiles, who's online, and the communities. The community chat is also nice because it puts everyone in a meeting place that allows them to get to know the counelors in that community. In the future we plan to also provide Twitter like services."
The venture looks promising and already seems to be getting an upswell of new accounts and more providers signing up. People looking for online video counseling or therapy can get an account for free and get started with a counselor within minutes, and providers are also welcome to join. The company does a full background check and certification verification on all of their providers, and they continue to find new ways to insure that they offer public access to "the best quality and standard of mental health providers." Here at NewsBubbles we're going to keep an eye on the company as it moves forward in it's quest to revolutionize the mental health industry.
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