Dear mental health advocate,
Back in January I started with my newsletter and I could never imagine to have such active and supportive subscribers. Currently, there are around 2500 of you receiving biweekly editions of The Present Psychologist Paper. In my last edition I asked for feedback and many of you were willing to provide some. Thank you so much for this!
Your feedback and interaction with my newsletter motivate me to keep going and it helps me to ensure I can write enough mental health content for you. Substack, the platform I use to write my newsletters, is a great and easy-to-use tool giving me the opportunity to write and share psychology insights quite easily. And they have many different great functionalities. Creating podcasts, sharing music, hosting Q&A sessions and much more…
So, what is the big news?
As a writer, freelancer and content creator I am putting in a lot of hours. These newsletters are so much fun to make, but they require days of researching, writing, editing and designing. I am quite new to the freelancing world and it can be challenging at times to guarantee financial security. Luckily, Substack offers the option to add a premium membership for my mental health content. As of today I am enabling this, hoping you can spare something to support my work.
Balancing my vision to make mental health content and psychology insights available to everyone while simultaneously trying to make a living is not easy. Ethically, I never want to take advantage of people’s mental health struggles for financial gain. For this reason, I am working hard to provide good quality content without compromising my integrity. I want to let you know that this premium membership is fully optional. If you are financially unable to, please do not force yourself to pay.
For those unable or unwilling to pay, I will keep sharing free content (so please do not unsubscribe!). However, for those who can financially support me I definitely want to add extra value. Below I have summarized what both subscriptions (free and premium) will consist of. If you receive this email, it means you automatically keep the free subscription and will receive free biweekly mental health content like before, unless you decide to unsubscribe.
Free subscription:
You will receive a free biweekly edition of The Present Psychologist Paper sent to your email inbox every other Saturday at 11 a.m. CET.
This biweekly edition will consist of:
One deep dive topic covering a mental health/psychology concept.
Article recommendations about interesting and useful psychology topics written by other mental health professionals.
Information about useful services and products related to mental health.
Premium subscription:
You will receive a premium biweekly edition of The Present Psychologist Paper sent to your email every other Saturday at 11 a.m. CET.
This biweekly edition will consist of:
One deep dive topic covering a mental health/psychology concept.
Two extra articles often focused on tips how to deal with certain struggles and other insights how to recognize various mental health conditions.
Article recommendations about interesting and insightful psychology topics written by other mental health professionals.
Information about other useful services and products related to mental health.
Access to the digital archive of all premium content. If you subscribe, all previous paid content will become available to you on my Substack.
A monthly edition of The Present Psychologist Pointers, which is an advice column covering 5 mental health struggles problems. This is general advice which should not be seen as a substitute for therapy, only as an extra insight. To discuss these issues, I have created an anonymous survey (which cannot be traced back to you). If you deal with a struggle, please fill in the survey to potentially have it covered in my advice column.
Okay, I’m interested. What is the financial damage?
Substack offers several options for a premium subscription. To support me financially, the following is possible:
A monthly premium subscription priced at $5.50 per month (approximately €5, the currency of my home country). It is possible to cancel or reactivate this subscription on a monthly basis.
An annual premium subscription. This one comes at a discount for $55 per year paid at once (instead of 12 x $5.50 = $66 per year).
A founding member premium annual subscription. This is only if you have the financial means and willingness to donate more than $55. You can enter the preferred amount yourself.
Because many of you have supported me already the past 3 months by reading my previous editions, I want to offer a one-time extra 15% discount for the annual subscription (total will be $46.75 for one year). This discount will only be valid until Friday 29th of April. Please note that a creditcard is needed to get a premium subscription.
However, if you would like to go premium without a yearly subscription and instead go for a monthly subscription, check the button below:
Aside from this, if you are a student and unable to pay, please reply to this email with some information about what you study and where. Then I could see if there is another way to provide access to the premium content.
If anyone wants to see what they can expect, here are the links to all previous editions, which consist of 3 articles each:
Thank you so much for your consideration and support!
Alf,
The Present Psychologist