This past year the University of Hartford’s Counseling and Psychological Services, CAPS, has started using Therapist Assisted Online, or TAO. TAO is an online program that offers therapy sessions to students or clients outside of the their usual meetings; it was created by Sherry Benton, a director at the University of Florida.

“Essentially how this program works is it’s the flipped classroom of therapy,” said Nicholas Pinkerton, the director of CAPS, “You take the educational component of therapy, like stress management.”

TAO is composed of engaging and interactive activities like journal exercises, educational videos, and other activities and allows students or clients access to a module online for these activities and enable them to enhance what they’re learning in therapy. And TAO allows for more therapy in a week and when they have their sessions with your therapist they’ve already done a lot of work.

To gain access to TAO, students first need to see CAPS and there they’ll access the situation and see what kind help they need. After that they’ll give the student an access key to use for the site and then go from there. And each staff member of CAPS is trained to be able to use TAO, including each therapist having uploaded videos to the site to aid their clients.