The world resolutely battles a deadly pandemic with doctors and caretakers dedicating all their time to treating patients, police officials working relentlessly at confining people in their homes, and essential service providers promising a comfortable lifestyle to people with their curfew cards.
The spread of the virus across the world and a forceful lockdown was unprecedented and has naturally magnified the stress and fear among citizens. Mental health doctors and professionals are required to be as present as possible during a time like this, but how are they managing during a lockdown?
Express Computer’s Radhika Udas interacted with Sahej Sethi, Director of Trijog, a Mental Health Care and Holistic Wellness organisation which provides a range of counseling solutions that ensure emotional wellbeing and psychological needs of individuals, corporates and educational enterprises globally.
Sahej Sethi answers the most pressing questions of how technology is benefiting psychologists at a time like this, the excessive use of social media, growth in online clients and shares some words of motivation.
Have you seen a rise in your online counseling sessions due to the lockdown?
With section 144 being implemented as of one week ago, we can speak on the data we possess as of today:
20-30% of the existing clients have migrated to the online therapy model which can be accessed by adults, adolescents and home programs for children.
All of our corporate and institutional well-being therapies are in continuance via our B2B virtual systems.
Preempting the lockdown we switched up our Ad campaigns & fueled Ad networks to reach a fresh audience seeking ‘Online Counselling’. Therefore we will have to closely map the results in the coming two weeks to understand the demand for the online counseling session.
What kind of technologies are used at Trijog to conduct sessions and manage operational activities?
We have our Application called Trijog – Know Your Mind that’s present on the play store & has a web-app version for i-phone users. The App helps us with all our video sessions, payments & prepares a log to record the frequency of visits & set follow-up reminders.
For all the internal operations and managing our unit, we have our internal ERP system and a lot of our tracking and maintenance happens via Google Drive.
How are you managing team coordination and communication when working from home?
Zoom call for connecting with the team; Google sheets for tracking the daily log and work maintenance; our tech also helps with easy monitoring, allocation & reminders for the counseling sessions and Trello is a great software to update their tasks.
As psychologists, what are your thoughts on technology replacing face to face interactions?
We need to understand why people claim that a face to face interaction has a higher impact. If I was to answer this as a client it would be for having my 5 senses active at the point of getting counseled.
Tech will always assist and give you an alternative option for therapy having a similar impact for adults and adolescents. Although in the case of child therapy most of the practices (Developmental, Occupational or Behavioural) require you to having a therapist guiding you while being present by your side.
The pandemic has led to people staying home all day leading to more social media usage. How do you think excessive use of social media at a time like this would affect a person’s mental health?
Social media orchestrates an overload of information that is flowing out and is enabling the consumption of this overload of information by us.
There are two things out on social media:
Firstly, if any information regarding the pandemic is taken in excess it leads to having a constant voice & chatter in your head, this constant exposure can send your mind into a whirlpool and a lot of information overload can induce a state of restlessness, fear, anxiety, stress, and paranoia. To keep the triggers of this to a minimum we should be consuming information from trusted sources & do everything that is in our control & be positive that the rest of the things out of our control will take their place.
Secondly, social media is making you feel like hey so many people are doing so many things and whether I am doing enough?
It is very important to have peace with the pace with your life and knowing that if our actions & beliefs are on the same page, we are on the right path to success.
Any words of motivation for people to get through this stressful time?
“Every day, Every Situation is an opportunity to see the world from a different lens”.
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Really great post. Thanks for sharing such an informative post. Hope you will share more about this kind of informative post. In Covid-19 pandemic situation, online counselling is really helpful to me because in this situation I am not going to the hospital to meet our consultant. So I am taking online counselling for mental health issues and feel better.
Great post I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this interesting and knowledgeable article.
Thank you for the info, I didn’t know much about it previously.