Since MyCounselor.Online was first formed in 2007, we have been working hard to solve three Rubik’s cube challenges facing access to excellent faith-based mental health for the body of Christ: Availability, Awareness, and Affordability.

Availability

For excellent faith-based mental health care to be accessible, it must exist at a scale capable of meeting the demand. However, several significant and multi-faceted challenges hinder availability.

Firstly, since the advent of managed care in the 1980s, insurance has increasingly focused on short-term symptom management through drug therapy and brief psychotherapy aimed primarily at preventing hospitalization rather than fostering long-term wholeness. Consequently, graduate training institutions have shifted towards brief therapies that emphasize short-term symptom reduction, as this aligns with hospital systems’ expectations and insurance reimbursement policies. This shift makes it increasingly difficult to find counselors trained in depth-oriented, emotion-focused, experiential therapy modalities that treat the whole person.

Compounding the issue, state licensing boards have nearly unanimously accepted CACREP accreditation as the standard for graduate counseling education. CACREP, a division of the secular American Counselors Association (ACA), mandates that counseling programs adhere to the ACA’s code of ethics, which conflicts with the faith-convictions of many Christian counselors. Consequently, Christian institutions face significant pressure to secularize their programs to maintain accreditation, resulting in students at Christian schools receiving an essentially secular education.

Post-graduation, the challenges continue. Hospital systems and state agencies typically do not permit a faith-integrated approach or long-term care focused on holistic healing. This restriction limits entry-level jobs for faith-based counselors to private practice settings, where insurance reimbursement is difficult to obtain, and available approaches are limited to brief symptom management. As a result, finding a job where one can practice excellent faith-based counseling is challenging, leading most to leave the field within two years.

Those who persevere and gain proficiency often reach full capacity quickly, managing around 50-60 clients at any given time. They then bring on associates as independent contractors without direct supervision of therapy session videos, leading to a high degree of variability in methods and results within the same practice. Moreover, connector organizations like BetterHelp and Talkspace contract with independent contractors, resulting in widely varying service quality and no theological accountability for those claiming to be “Christian counselors.”

Solving the Rubik’s cube of a highly scalable, consistently high-quality, faith-based counseling experience has been our primary focus. After fifteen years of concerted effort, the MyCounselor.Online (MCO) solution involves:

1) Developing our own model of care, Neuroscience Informed Christian Counseling® (NICC), which integrates the best mental health practices, neuroscience, and sound discipleship theology.

2) Creating a two-year post-graduate residency to train all our counselors in NICC, combining traditional academic learning and deliberate practice with close supervision from actual session videos.

3) Hiring all counselors as employees (not independent contractors) to ensure consistent training in our proven model and close supervision.

4) Implementing a stringent 10-stage hiring process that hires about 2% of applicants.

5) Establishing quality assurance practices, including weekly video reviews by supervisors and outcome data from 100% of clients, ensuring high levels of accountability and continuous improvement.

This approach has enabled MyCounselor.Online to provide a scalable solution with a consistently high quality, resulting in a 92% satisfaction rate among clients.

Awareness

Even if high-quality help exists, it is inaccessible if people are unaware of it. One significant challenge we face is increasing awareness of the help we provide and helping people understand the differences in quality between our services and those they might have experienced elsewhere.

In the mental health care space, large, venture-capital-backed firms dominate traditional ad mediums, effectively drowning out awareness of alternative services. In local communities, the public’s lack of education about mental health nuances makes it difficult to discern high-quality professional experiences from ineffective short-term symptom management approaches.

MyCounselor.Online relies on partner organizations and former clients to spread awareness, helping more people access the care they need and long for. Solving the Rubik’s cube of awareness remains a significant challenge.

Affordability

High-quality faith-based mental and relational health help is non-existent to those who cannot afford it. Financial accessibility remains a significant barrier to accessing care.

Highly trained professional counselors are expensive to develop, requiring eight years of post-high school training and thousands of dollars in educational expenses. Moreover, a counselor’s time is incredibly finite and limited, with a full-time counselor able to provide around 1,200 therapeutic hours annually. The cost of developing and compensating these counselors, along with operational expenses, must be recovered in the per-unit pricing of the counselor’s time, resulting in costs between $126-$225 per session. Since holistic faith-based care is not typically covered by insurance, services must often be paid for out-of-pocket.

This cost barrier prices out many individuals from accessing high-quality faith-based care. Through its affiliated foundation, Partners For Strong Families, MyCounselor.Online works with organizations to create scholarship funds to help address this issue. However, the need remains greater than the current scholarship funds. Solving the Rubik’s cube of affordability continues to be a challenge.

Partner With Us!

We need your help! MyCounselor.Online has made significant progress in solving the Rubik’s cube of access to excellent faith-based mental health care by creating a scalable solution that provides consistently high-quality faith-based mental and relational care online, available worldwide.

However, we need your help in solving the awareness and affordability Rubik’s cubes. Please partner with us to connect those in need with the help we provide and bridge the financial gap for those with limited resources. Together, we can ensure that excellent faith-based mental health care is accessible to all who need it.

Contact me, Josh Spurlock, directly to discuss how you can partner with MyCounselor.Online to increase access to high quality faith-based mental healthcare.