1-800-THERAPIST Network

http://www.800therapist.com
By Psych Central Staff

A Review of 1-800-THERAPIST

1-800-THERAPIST is a simple telephone referral service, along the lines of 1-800-DENTIST. In our review, we found it frustrating to find an actual therapist nearby. In the age of the Internet, a telephone referral service seems like a throwback to the 1980s. Who uses the phone anymore to find a professional, when professional directories are available one click away online?

Using 1-800-THERAPIST is as simple as calling their toll-free 1-800 number. There's no need to visit their website, because you can't actually find a therapist using their website! What the site offers, instead, is a slew of generic mental health articles copied from multiple sources, such as the NIMH and various press releases -- nearly all of which appear unattributed and without dates. This is apparently done to try and create a larger search engine impression, so that 1-800-THERAPIST will show up in search engine results.

When you call the toll-free number, you are connected to an automated, computer-voice driven system. If you enjoy those kinds of systems when you call your local cable company ("Press 1 to find a therapist, press 2 for..."), you'll find 1-800-THERAPIST as familiar as a tooth-extraction at the dentist. After all, why employ humans when a computer can take care of your referral needs?

You have two choices when you call this referral service. You can find a local therapist in your area, or you can supposedly "talk to a therapist now." We tried "talking to a therapist now" a few times over the course of a regular business day. We never got through to a live person, only a voicemail for "Joyce."

We also recently tried a dozen different ZIP codes around the country using the referral system. 1-800-THERAPIST, being old-fashioned, doesn't seem to care what your personal therapy needs are. There's no option to specify what kind of therapist you're looking for, what educational credentials are important to you, or even what gender you'd like to see.

Time and time again, the ZIP codes we entered gave us referrals to therapists nowhere close to the ZIP code entered. In one city with 60,000 residents and 60 minutes outside of Boston, it gave us a referral to the Massachusetts General Hospital operator! Yes, just the operator. (There are over five dozen therapists within 20 miles of this particular city.) In another instance, in a county with a population of over 500,000 people, 1-800-THERAPIST referred us to a neighboring state's large city about 70 minutes away. (The county in question has hundreds of therapists.) If you live in the 561,000+ area of Madison, WI, life is even worse -- "No locations found near Madison, Wisconsin." This is where the rubber meets the road -- if 1-800-THERAPIST can't actually refer you to a local therapist, it seems the service leaves something to be desired (in our opinion). A therapist referral service is useless if it can't find you a therapist nearby.

1-800-THERAPIST did find us a therapist when we entered in Las Vegas, the largest city we tried. It referred us not to an independent therapist, however, but rather a very expensive, state-of-the-art, private inpatient psychiatric hospital. If you were looking for outpatient psychotherapy (as most people are), this referral would be of little use.

All in all, where you would expect personalized, tailored human service on a phone call, we were disappointed in the automated, computer-driven menus of 1-800-THERAPIST. We were even more disappointed in the lack of therapists on the service, which -- according to its own website -- has been around since 1994. You'd think a service that was 16 years old would have more therapists in its network. We also found that the one thing that could differentiate the service -- humans -- is missing. It's not clear why a person who is already online wouldn't just use one of the multitude of online therapist directories. These directories allow you to choose a therapist based upon your needs, not just by whether a professional has paid to subscribe to the service. You can find attributes of a therapist that are important to you.

We don't link to the 1-800-THERAPIST website because there's no value in going to the site, since it doesn't actually let you look for a therapist online. All the information you need to use the service is right there in its name.

Submitted on: 13-Nov-2008
Last updated: 1-Jun-2010