Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, hey Shauna, here you are listening to the delightful audio sode. These are email episodes where you get tips, tricks and information about the mental health industry and how you can create content, products and services that are complementary to the work that you do as a mental health therapist. Today I have five trend predictions in the mental health industry 2024, and you are going to want to hear these. So let's jump right in. So I'm an Etsy seller, and I do have an Etsy shop right now. There's nothing in my Etsy shop because I've been thinking more and more about where I want to place my products and how I want to go about that. But I also get trend predictions for the year of 2024. I got trend predictions for the year of 2023. Etsy gives you like a color of the year, depending on what color they think is going to be big for that year, and they also give you places people are going. So this led me to think more about what does it mean for the mental health industry? What do we see trending? What do we see people talking more and more about? And what is it that people want or need? A big thing for 2024 is that people are getting more and more overwhelmed with the fast paced nature of our society, as well as the amount of strain that people are experiencing when it comes to their finances, as well as strain from the stress of their work environments. So I see this reflected in a lot of the 2024 predictions. I went through various sources, from Forbes to CBS News to some articles that I saw, even from EPA networks, to talk about what we may see trending in 2024. So the first thing that I thought was really interested is more expert content that is backed by science. We know that the young generations, Gen Z and even young millennials are turning to social media to get a lot of their information. They're pulling in a lot of content. Before, when we were seeing people pull in a lot of content, they were getting this content from many people, right? It could have been coaches, it could have been other people with their experiences in mental health. And many people were coming to self diagnoses, and which I think is important because there had been and continues to be a lack of engaging resources, a lack of affordable resources to get formal diagnoses. So now what we are seeing is a trend towards leaning into experts, a trend towards getting more sound information from people who know these fields, who have an expert knowledge when it comes to this information. And they want information that is backed with statistics and science. They want data driven information, which is good. If you are a professional who does this work regularly, you can be one that provides that kind of information.
[00:03:10] So if you are a therapist who is looking to get onto social media, what I would say is niche down. Get really focused on who it is that you are serving and learn more about them. Give them the information that they are looking for. Right. Give them those statistics. Talk about how certain approaches could be helpful. You don't have to give them the therapy there. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't recommend doing therapy on social media, but I would say talk more about the understanding, the knowledge that you have about certain things and how they are affected by mental health and give them information about how they can get to where they would like to be. The next trend that I think is really interesting is higher demand for more social connections. The reason why I think this is really interesting is because after being in a pandemic and having less social interactions over the past three years, more and more people are craving connections in person. Now, if you are an online therapist like myself, this can be a little daunting to think about, but I want you to stretch outside the box a little bit. Journey with me and let's talk about this, because it doesn't mean that you have to give up your whole virtual practice. As a matter of fact, I would not do that. I have certain ideas about how I would go about meeting this demand for social connections. One, that may mean that I do more coaching and gather more knowledge about how people can gather more social connections outside of therapy with me. So they still meet with me virtually, but they are practicing their social connections outside. Two, I can incorporate some kind of in person sessions, like intensives or doing a very specific program where I am meeting with some people in person. Two, you could also do workshops so you have your practice, but from time to time you have the occasional workshop where you are meeting with a small group of people in person, or you're doing some things like collaborating with other therapists who do yoga or sound work. You can still have those workshops, but you're pulling in others to collaborate and create more in person work that way. And three, a big one that people love to talk about, we are seeing a bit of a travel boom, is retreats. Now you can do retreats in multiple ways. So you can do retreats by hosting the retreat yourself. You could do the retreats by putting on the curriculum, creating the curriculum, and selling the curriculum. You can also do a hybrid of that, of selling the curriculum and inviting people to hire you to host the retreat, or you can create the retreat for the people. So, like, let's say you have a couple, you have the curriculum, or you have your retreat book and you're selling them the program and creating it for them so that they're hosting it for themselves. And maybe you couple that in with some before and after sessions so that they know what to look for when they are going on their trip. So I think that the in person sessions can really mend nicely with virtual work so that you're not putting all of your eggs in one basket, but you're still hosting your online therapy sessions and then maybe doing one or two things in the community to bring in more funds as well as help people in those connections. The next trend that we are seeing is addressing how chronic illnesses are affecting mental wellness and how we can increase our mental wellness to assist us in those chronic illnesses. So this is something that we are taking notice of. We have a society in which people are sicker, where people are needing more physical health care, and some people have long term chronic illnesses that greatly affect their mental wellness. So having an idea of how people are affected by their chronic illnesses and having an idea of how they can continue to live and enjoy life with a chronic illness may be something that you are doing in your practice and something to be aware of. Speaking of physical health, there is going to be a lot of talk about diet culture. Again, we are seeing a lot of people talking about those diet shots like ozempic, and there is another diet shot out there. And so with the introduction of those shots and more and more people talking about weight loss shots and weight loss in general, we're going to see more and more talk about physical health and diet culture. We don't know exactly how this is going to swing. It might swing in a direction of going back into toxic diet culture. So this is something to be prepared of, especially if you're someone who's well versed in eating disorders and well versed in unhealthy eating habits and how that affects mental health, we are going to see overall people talking a lot about their physical health in general, because they are again focusing on how we can become a healthier society.
[00:08:33] Now, imagine that a lot of our physical health issues, a lot of our health issues are driven by our stress in our work environments. And so it's predicted that a lot of people are going to be coming in with these stressors, and we are going to have to figure out ways of helping them reduce the stress and provide almost a holistic view of care. And the last trend prediction for 2024 is wellness backed by science. We're going to continue to see people engaging in self care, people engaging in ways of trying to be healthier, but they want the scientific backing of it. We are going to see people wanting that data and wanting the stuff that is actually going to help them and actually going to work for them instead of the ideas. And so again, I think this is going to be really good for the profession because this is where we shine. We are trained in helping people make change and we have so many modalities and so much access to information that it could be really easy for us as clinicians to create programs and services that are backed by science and backed by individual personal needs of our clientele. So these are the predictions for the mental health industry in 2024. There are much more out there. Did any of these surprise you or worry you? I'll say right off bat, the news around a higher demand for more social connection and possibly more in person services led me to feel somewhat nervous as an online therapist, but that also got my creative juices flowing. The idea of offering intensives or even workshops within my niche got me so excited. And I know this is something that people are interested in because intensives are a way of creating more work in less time, and so people may see big results a little bit faster with intensives, and I enjoy that. And people are looking for shorter engagement in therapy because it can be so costly. So intensives can also be cost effective. Even though you might be paying more upfront, you might be getting more for less time, which is really important because again, people want to be spending more time living their lives. This would also help me to remain online, but also offer other appealing services, which I think is important because again, I don't think it's necessary for us as clinicians to put all of our eggs into the single service basket. I think it's really important that we diversify our incomes and this is just another way to diversify your services. This is what I mean by making these trends fit into what you already do instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. So I would love to hear your thoughts around these trends. I have a space, the therapizing therapist collective, where I help clinicians build their social media while talking about the complementary side hustles for their practices. You can join the group, it is on Facebook. And let me know which one of these trends do you see fitting in with your practice? This is the delightful audio episode delivered straight to you via email. I look forward to doing more of these again. Join the group. Let's get talking and get you moving towards creating a practice where you are building your lucrative career. Bye for now. Bye.
