I wanted to address a question that has come up a few times and give you my reply. I hope this helps you better understand the language on our homepage.

7 Cups of Tea provides emotional support via listening and therapy. We have more listeners than many countries have mental health professionals. When a person hits a general request they are very likely to be picked up by a listener because we have many more listeners than we have mental health professionals. That, however, does not mean that we do not have mental health professionals on the site doing therapy. We do. For example, my wife is a licensed therapist in the US and she regularly takes chats.

Here is a metaphor. Imagine we are a store. We have lots and lots of different kinds of cheese. Cheese from all over the world. Cheese for people with different tastes. We also have crackers, but a much smaller selection. Turns out there are a lot more varieties of cheese than there are crackers. We advertise as selling both cheese and crackers, even though we have a lot more cheese than crackers. This is a pretty bad metaphor, but you get what Im trying to say.

Now, to take a bad metaphor and make it worse, imagine we didnt have the crackers organized. Imagine you had to hunt for the crackers. That is where we are now with 7 Cups. We have lots of therapists from all over the world, but they are not organized or easy to find.

This is an important problem for us to solve and it is one that we will address as soon as we get through this next big push. This is what you can expect. Well have a directory where people can easily find online and offline therapists. Therapists will have separate profiles. Theyll look different from listener profiles. Members, guests, clients will also be able to follow therapists just like they will soon be able to follow listeners. The infrastructure will be the same. Clients, eventually, may have to fill out different paperwork for therapists and, at some point, we may support video-conferencing for therapists (this may be necessary depending upon the state or country they are in).

What we are building with 7 cups is a global mental health system. You can see it as a continuum of care. People seek emotional support from listeners and when problems are too complicated or severe, then theyll be able to be referred to therapists. This is a long game – and like everything with a startup – it requires patience. Well also eventually work with psychiatric hospitals and other health systems, but that is much further out. We just need to take things one step at a time.

One final caveat on the use of the words therapy and counseling. We are an international Website. We provide support to people all over the world. It is very important to not take an ethnocentric (defined as: evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one's own culture.). Many countries have different definitions of therapists and counselors. In the Western part of the world where there is a more established mental health infrastructure the definitions and criteria are quite a bit more stringent than other parts of the world where there is less infrastructure. Our aim is to build a global mental health system, so it is very important that we keep an open and respectful approach to how mental health is defined and delivered across the world.

Some of you may think that we should wait to use these words until after we have the directory built. I dont think that takes a global approach to mental health and I also dont think it is true to all that we provide here. If you disagree with me, that is more than okay. I just ask that you be patient, and look at mental health internationally, as we roll out updates to reflect the role of therapists on 7 cups.