Andi Lyn Kornfeld hasn’t seen a patient in person for months. Yet every morning she wakes up, puts on a professional outfit, does her hair and makeup, walks to her office down the hall, and settles in front of her computer screen for the day.
“I kept the normalcy. I tried to for myself,” she said. “I felt that the way that I could help the most was to be who I was before.”
Kornfeld is a marriage and family therapist who has been seeing her patients virtually from her New York City home since the coronavirus struck in mid-March. She is one of thousands of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists across the U.S. who found themselves having to quickly adapt to virtual practices at a time when the need for therapy was on the rise.
“I did not do virtual sessions really prior unless it was an emergency,” she said. “But I moved virtual as soon as the lockdown happened in New York.”
While telepsychiatry and remote therapy sessions have been recognized as effective since the early 1960s, COVID-19 has put the practice into hyperdrive.
“In the past few decades preceding COVID, there was a large growing evidence base showing that we can treat most conditions in mental health [remotely] with equally effective outcomes. Although processes are different, obviously it was originally used for more remote populations and to provide access,” said Jay Shore, who is based out of Aurora, Colorado, and is chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) committee on telepsychiatry.
“And then when COVID hit, out of necessity, I think almost all organizations I know in the mental health sphere are using it to some extent.”
According to a June APA study, prior to the public health emergency only 36 percent of psychiatrists utilized telehealth in some capacity for their practice. Since the pandemic, fewer than 2 percent of the group reported not utilizing telehealth at all, with nearly 85 percent saying they used telehealth for at least three quarters of their appointments.
While Zoom sessions have allowed doctors and therapists the ability to continue to counsel patients and prescribe needed medication, they’ve also posed challenges.
Kornfeld said her biggest learning curve was figuring out how to read body language over a computer screen.
“I had always said that I didn’t like virtual sessions because the eye tracking wasn’t the same,” she said.
She found it hard to tell if a patient looking at the camera was looking her in the eye or at the room behind her. Then there was the issue with silences. In person, she said silence was a useful tool for conversation. Online, it could seem like a technical error.
Family and marriage therapist Andi Lyn Kornfeld is learning how to read body language and deal with silences over Zoom.
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