How does one go about finding a therapist?

Factual Questions
1

A lot of threads asking for advice include responses to find a specific type of therapist to deal with your problems. Advice columns also have this suggestion in spades. But other than the yellow pages (and who really uses this anymore?), or random internet searches, how would I know the therapist I’m getting is a good one or is qualified to deal with a specific type of problem?

Is there a website like, I don’t know, the APA’s, that works like a typical car shopping website that I can go and enter my specific type of therapy I’m looking for, a price range, hours, and distance and it’ll give me a bunch of choices?

2

That’s a good question and I don’t have the perfect answer, but I would ask my regular doctor, or if that doesn’t work, ask at whatever hospital is near you. I would NOT just choose from the phonebook!

3

Ask your GP for a referral. That’s how it’s done here, anyway.

4

I’ve had poor luck getting recommendations from GPs. I’m sure that’s not the case everywhere, but I’ve found it to be a question they’re not expecting and not prepared to answer. So the responses they give are little more than “I think I know somebody…” I hope that is just bad luck, and many GPs have professional colleagues they can wholeheartedly recommend.

So yeah, look in the “phone book” which I think is an old way of saying “the internet”. Search for therapists specializing in the topic area you’re seeking help with. You’ll probably find several near you (or too many in a large city, or too few in a rural town). So “marriage counselors Shelbyville” or “child abuse therapists Springfield” will give multiple good leads. There are websites which claim to rate doctors, but they’re off far, far less useful than the ones which rate restaurants. Because of that, call and email the prospective therapists. Ask them practical questions such as rates, hours, etc. Then ask more specific questions about what their therapy style is, perhaps describe something about what you’re goals are, and get a feel for how the therapists respond.

Once you know what therapy styles are out there, you can do a bit of reading on those. Perhaps one sounds good, or one has been tried before and failed, or one is too faith based, or not faith based enough…

Hopefully that is enough to give you a sense of which ones might be a good match. Some will be easy to eliminate, because they won’t call back, or they’ll be non-responsive and abrupt when you talk to them, or they might out right tell you “I don’t work with people trying to overcome pet loss grief.”

If you have insurance, and expect your insurance to pay for the therapy, then they probably have specific rules to follow. Some might require referrals from your primary physician, though others will allow you to see a mental health specialist without a referral. They will probably have an (outdated and often outright wrong) list of therapists accepting the insurance. That should give you a list to start the interview process I described above.

So, in summary, pick a therapist about the same way you’d pick a roofing contractor. If nobody you know can give you a recommendation, then start talking to several, accepting “bids”, and then just pick one and go with it.

All of that is fine if you’re mostly well functioning, but need help with something in particular. It can be a huge burden if you’re trying to deal with something like depression, where getting enough motivation to put on clean underwear is hard, let alone spending an afternoon struggling with an insurance company list of acceptable therapists filled with wrong numbers.

5

Why not? You are going to have to try three or four before you find one that is right for you. Unless your friend/family/physician has a whole list, you are going to be going to some strangers eventually.

6

Word-of-mouth.
My wife’s practice is full of patients who came simply by woprd-of-mouth. Never an ad or flier or yellow pages.
It’s always “So-and-so told me you were good”.

Ask around.

7

If you have health insurance (and I realize that’s a big If these days), check their list of providers. I actually found my therapist by cross-referencing my insurance company’s list with a list of therapists in the area from the Psychology Today website, then meeting with him so we could decide if we liked each other. That worked for me on the first try, but I’m an old hand at finding therapists :(. After 30 years, I know not to waste time if I don’t feel a connection in the initial meeting.

8

Our community has an outpatient referral service located within a psychiatric hospital.

9

Insurance providers don’t actually print lists anymore, it’s almost all online and more up to date than such lists used to be. Or you can call and ask about your benefits for behavioral health and they’ll tell you. Another potential source of recommendations is your EAP, if you have one. EAPs include a pretty wide variety of stuff now days, and many include a benefit for a number of counseling sessions. If you’re looking for something long-term, than a better bet is the insurance company or word of mouth, but if you’re looking for some shorter term stress management, grief counseling, or something like that the EAP might be helpful.

10

Our insurance company prints a book of their providers every year and sends it with the new contract and cards. They also have providers listed online, but the printed list is necessary because they serve a large population who cannot or will not use the internet, like my mother and mother-in-law.

11

All states have public mental health clinics which are private, mostly publicly funded, clinics. These all have sliding scales for patients with little, or no, ability to pay. Do a search within your state government pages for public mental health to find locations. They used to be in the blue pages of the phone books.

You might also, find them, by just doing a search for ‘mental health’ <your city name>.

While you might not have the ability to pick and choose a therapist, you will go through an intake process which will help identify your problems and an appropriate therapist can be suggested.

Note, that in most cases, these clinics rely on group therapy to cut expenses but private sessions are also available, although at possibly higher cost.

Bob

12

Seriously - don’t expect that to last. They may be printing it just for your employer group as a special request - approved providers can vary widely depending on what coverage the individual group purchases. The shift in the industry is not to print these books anymore, especially as they outdate so quickly (before they’re mailed, even) and they’re a big expense to prepare and post. Can’t use the internet? Folks who need info on doctors are instructed to call the plan’s member services number and they’ll either be given names over the phone, or the customer service person will use the internet to pull up the most current information for the member, print it off, and then mail it to them individually to fit their particular need. (This is a small part of the job I’m currently doing in health education for an insurance company, one of the really big ones. While I have no doubt they would very grudgingly print a provider book on request for a ‘best customer’ who was willing to lay out the extra $$$ for the service, we’ve been told they don’t exist and aren’t offered…and that most of the competition doesn’t do them either.)

13

I’ve always gone to my health insurance’s provider list and booked an appointment with the first therapist that didn’t have a three month waiting list for new clients. We tend to be a shortage area here.

Each type of mental health provider in the U.S. is licensed at the state level. Offhand, those are Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Licensed Professional Counselor, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, various types of licensed addictions counselors, counseling psychologists (PhDs or PsyDs). I understand psychiatrists (M.D.'s) are moving away from providing talk therapy and doing mostly medication management. You can search for the particular professional organization for the type of counselor in which you are interested, and they should be able to provide a membership list that often includes specialties and such.

14

My insurance provider is a large one in our state but doesn’t even register on a national level (like Kaiser or Humana, for instance), so maybe they just do it because they serve a smaller audience. So far there is no indication that they intend to stop providing these written listings.

Back to the original question posed by YogSosoth, where I am the mental health services mentioned by lisacurl are provided by the county rather than the state, so you might also want to check with your county (or provincial?) department of health to see if they offer counseling services or referrals.