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Therapist Aid: How Can I Get Therapy if I Have No Money?

Each month, I’ve highlighted a small business in Jacksonville and how that business has adapted to survive the pandemic. This month, I’m highlighting Therapist Aid. Woody Schuldt, a qualified mental health counsellor, designed it.

Therapist Aid is committed to assisting mental health professionals in improving their skills by providing free evidencebased education and therapy resources. The organisation develops resources with clients in mind, which includes avoiding jargon and developing tools that are beneficial not just in theory but also in practise. Their educational products for use by mental health professionals in treatment sessions range from downloadable worksheets to movies and interactive games.

About Therapist Aid Founder Woody Schuldt

Woody Schuldt received his master’s degree in counselling psychology from the University of North Florida, where he also received his undergraduate degree. After that, he began working as a therapist in community mental health facilities, where he saw a diverse range of patients.

When Schuldt realised there were not enough user-friendly internet tools available for therapists, he decided to build Therapist Aid. Since he had previously gathered a modest collection of worksheets for his own individual use in the course of his professional career as a mental health counsellor, he made the decision to make them available to the general public.

Therapist Aid

Covid-19 and Therapist Aid’s Role in the Changing Mental Health Landscape

When schools, clinics, and hospitals all of a sudden began the shift to telehealth in the month of March, the majority of the industry was taken aback by the change. There were a lot of therapists who had never ever heard of Zoom, let alone conducted counselling sessions online. It was a chaotic time when practitioners learned the ropes and adapted their traditional therapeutic approaches to this new reality. During this time, there was a lot of confusion.

Woody witnessed a significant change in the manner in which Therapist Aid’s resources were being utilised during his time there. During the month of February, the company’s clients requested printed worksheets for in-person meetings. By the end of March, they required the interactive activities to be able to be shared and carried out virtually.

Even their computer-based tools were developed at the beginning of the year with the premise that the therapist and client would be working side-by-side, sharing a device. The personnel at Therapist Aid worked feverishly to broaden their platform and make necessary adjustments to their materials in order to make them suitable for telehealth.

This necessitated the development of an infrastructure that would allow therapists to easily send resources from Therapist Aid to their clients, the addition of more specific instructions to activities, and the creation of digital versions of resources that had previously only been effective when used face-to-face.

After a few trying months, they finally saw some results from all of their hard work. They were able to stay up with the shift toward providing mental health care on the internet, which had nearly completely replaced traditional methods. Now that the move is taking place in reverse — back to face-to-face treatment — they are in a position to provide a product that is more comprehensive.

Protecting Their Assets With Copyright Registration

During the process of this transformation, Therapist Aid came to the realisation that in order to continue delivering the materials they were offering to therapists and the general public, they needed to secure copyright registrations.

The vast majority of the materials that they had developed over the course of a number of years were original innovations that had been made by Woody Schuldt. He had a strong aversion to the idea of other people copying and republishing his work without first obtaining either his consent or his knowledge. Therefore, Woody went through the process of educating himself on the many kinds of copyright applications and determining which ones were the most appropriate for his original works.

Please get in touch with the intellectual property law department at Marks Gray if you are publishing unique works on your website and require guidance regarding the protections afforded by copyright laws. We are happy to be of assistance to you.

How Can I Get Therapy if I Have No Money?

Social services, nonprofit organisations, universities, financial assistance programmes, and employee assistance programmes all offer counselling services that are either free or at a significantly reduced cost. The price of a therapy session lasting one hour can range anywhere from roughly $65 to $250, depending on the level of education and expertise of your therapist, as well as the location of their office.

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