Combatting Loneliness with a Therapist Discovery Tool
I often find myself struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation. In an effort to combat these feelings, I decided to build a "therapist finder" tool. I decided to scrape the contents of Psychology Today and utilize the Mixpeek Intelligent File Store API to ask questions
Build Quickly
First we need to wrangle the data, so I turned to Beautiful Soup, a popular Python library for web scraping. Beautiful Soup makes it easy to extract data from HTML and XML files, which is exactly what I needed to do to gather information about therapists from the Psychology Today website.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url = "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists"
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")
therapist_names = []
for therapist in soup.find_all("div", {"class": "result-row normal-result row"}):
name = therapist.find("a", {"class": "result-name"})
therapist_names.append(name.text.strip())
print(therapist_names)
Then once we have each therapists' urls, we can send them to the Mixpeek API:
import mixpeek
api_key = "your-api-key"
index_id = "therapists"
therapists_html_links = ["https://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/prof_detail.php?profid=156681", ...]
mix = Mixpeek(api_key)
mix.index(index_id, therapists_html_links)
Impress Users
We can now ask questions like:
- Which therapists accept Aetna, practice Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and are located in NYC?
- Which therapists are psychoanalytic, offer tele-therapy and focus on LGBTQ+
- Which therapists focus on addiction and don't accept insurance?
- Which therapist is a woman that focuses on trauma and accepts Cigna
Note: It's only indexed 1000 therapists as that's the Mixpeek free tier limit.
Inspire the Future
If you have an eye for code, you can use the Mixpeek API to build any number of use cases. We're happy to help too, just contact us.
- Embedded Search and Discovery: Embedding the low code search widget on your marketplace can improve product discovery
- Personalized recommendations: Through analyzing users' behavior and preferences, the Mixpeek API could recommend products or services that are likely to appeal to them.
- Dynamic pricing: Mixpeek could analyze historical sales data and adjust prices in real-time based on market trends and fluctuations.
- Translation: Facilitate communication between parties who speak different languages and increase the reach of the marketplace to a global audience.