The Cut - The Therapy-App Fantasy

The summer of 2020, recalls Hillary Schieve, was hard. The pandemic was bearing down across the country, protests over racial injustice were erupting, and her sister’s breast cancer had become terminal. Schieve moved her sister into her house to take care of her; at night, she would watch the news and wonder how she was going to keep it together. Then her sister died, and a few weeks later, Schieve’s brother unexpectedly died too.

“When my brother died,” she said, “that’s when I fell apart.” She was having anxiety attacks; she was crying all the time. She wanted to find a therapist to talk to, so she started making calls but no one could fit her in for weeks. She was frustrated and unsure of what to do next. “I’m sitting at my counter, and a commercial comes on with Michael Phelps,” she remembered. It was an ad for the therapy app Talkspace. “I was like, I don’t know, maybe I should try that.”

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This week begins with a full moon in kind and lovely Libra on Sunday — find out what that means for you with this week’s Madame Clairevoyant horoscope. She vanished decades ago, and her children just learned she had been killed. Megan Thee Stallion donated $50,000 to the legal nonprofit Advancing Justice Atlanta after spa shootings. Prince William was somehow crowned “world’s sexiest bald man” and Stanley Tucci fans aren’t having it. Hoping to travel in 2021? You might need a vaccine passport. And for the first time in Gallup’s polling history, less than half of U.S. adults report belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque.

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