When Talkspace Sued PsiAN and Me

After an ad aired widely featuring Michael Phelps talking about having felt suicidal and then endorsing “therapy for all,” the first compliment arrived. The ad, with Michael first lying on the bottom of an empty pool that's windblown with dead leaves and then (bizarrely) sitting in an overstuffed armchair in the middle of the barren pool, was polished, professional. With its broad, sweeping message and high production value, it felt like a public service announcement for the betterment of society. A colleague sent an email to a professional listserv, stating, “Kudos to PsiAN and their efforts at bringing the importance of talk therapy to public awareness.”

The congratulations turned into confusion; the fantasy—not least of which included where the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN) might have gotten the funding or connections required to pull off such an ad—dissolved immediately. Others quickly chimed in to say this was a paid promotional appearance of the Olympian by Talkspace. Talkspace was an online company that sold primarily text messaging services to consumers as a means to communicate with licensed therapists. They also sold phone and video packages at higher prices and claimed to be the future of therapy. The compliment seemed surprising since, far from endorsing the kinds of therapy of depth, insight, and relationship that are central to PsiAN's mission, Talk-space predominantly sold text services that seemed to simulate therapy. Adding to the surprise was the fact that PsiAN had been in existence for only a little over a year. Yes, we had grown rapidly. Yes, we had ambitious goals to change the public's narrative about therapy. But we were far from being able to engage someone like Phelps on national TV.

Alarmed by the appeal of this ad and its presumptive definition of therapy, the two other PsiAN co-founders, Nancy Burke and Janice Muhr, and I started to research Talkspace1. This was May 2018, well before the pandemic and before many