Tips for Finding a Therapist

An Insider Info-Dump on Where, When, and How to Find Help

Sep 07, 2025

A couple of readers have contacted me from other states to ask if I have room for new clients. I am flattered when this happens and I wish that I could take everyone. Unfortunately, I am only licensed to practice in Washington state, and my caseload is bursting at the seams. The process of finding a therapist can be daunting. Finding someone with availability who takes your insurance is hard enough, much less finding a good therapist who meets that criteria. I can’t fix the structural problems that contribute to the shortage of qualified mental health providers, but I can offer some tips that might help you in your search. (These tips will be most useful for folks in the USA. If you have tips on how to find a therapist in other countries, please share in the comments!)1

WHEN to find a therapist

While my caseload is generally full year-round, there are definite seasonal patterns that influence when caseloads wax and wane. I’m sorry to say that September is one of the worst months to try to find a therapist. In the past two weeks, five former clients have reached out to ask if I have availability. If you’re looking for a therapist now and you’re not having much luck, don’t lose hope. Therapists who have no availability now may have room in December or January.

Summer months tend to be quiet. As the weather warms up in May, people start feeling more cheerful and often end treatment. June and July are often when therapists will have the most room in their schedules. The people who felt better in May often feel worse again as the days get shorter and cooler, and they come flooding back as kids go back to school. This increased demand usually wanes around December as people become busy with holiday social events and holiday travel.

January is a good time to find a therapist. This is partly influenced by insurance coverage. If your company changed insurance providers during open enrollment in November, the changes usually take effect January first, and clients who are now out-of-network may end treatment. January is also when deductibles reset and clients with high deductibles often end treatment at this time, then come back around April when their deductible is met.

Where NOT to find a therapist

I strongly caution you to steer clear of the many online-only, heavily advertised, private equity-owned therapy platforms like BetterHelp. Please do not give your money or your trust to these therapy mills. These platforms exploit therapists with substandard working conditions and exploit clients with substandard care. In case you missed it, BetterHelp was successfully sued for sharing protected patient information with Facebook and other social media sites. BetterHelp has a huge advertising budget and is probably following you around the internet with targeted ads if you’ve searched for anything related to finding a therapist, but please do not be tempted by their promises of how easy it is to start therapy with them. If you happen to have a good therapist at BetterHelp, I’m happy for you; but I repeatedly hear horror stories from clients who started therapy with BetterHelp, only to be mistreated by unethical or incompetent therapists, or stood up by therapists who didn’t bother to show up. BetterHelp pays therapists less than the industry standard, so if a therapist is working at BetterHelp, it is either because they don’t know better, or more often, because they are bad at their job so they are unable to retain clients in a private practice and need a constant source of referrals. Check out this episode of Culture Study to learn more about why private equity is horrible for patient care.

I would also discourage you from seeking treatment at large corporate healthcare providers. These vary regionally. Optum is one example that you will find across the country. Many of these healthcare companies are now owned by private equity. Having worked in these settings for the first half of my career, I can tell you that providers in these systems are under tremendous pressure to see a huge volume of patients and pay is often tied to exploitative productivity metrics (i.e. the percentage of patients who show up for their scheduled appointments, which therapists have no control over). Therapists work in these systems because they need a predictable salary and benefits which are harder to come by in private practice or small group practices. I have known a number of wonderful and talented therapists working in these settings, but burnout is high, and you are unlikely to be able to see your therapist more than once a month. When I worked at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, my colleagues and I were so overloaded with patients that we could only see a client once every six weeks or so, and there were multiple lawsuits about how excessive wait times led to patient suicides.

WHERE to find a therapist

I am admittedly biased as a therapist in private practice, but based on fifteen years of experience in a variety of settings, I would encourage you to look for a therapist in a solo or small group private practice. Those of us running our own practice have to be good at what we do to stay in business. My client turnover is very low, former clients often return, and new clients are often referred by former clients. (Ethical therapists won’t see close friends or family members at the same time, or sometimes ever, because this can pose a conflict of interest. Just FYI in case you were hoping to go to your best friend’s therapist or your sister’s therapist.) A therapist who has managed to stay in business in private practice for years is more likely to be competent (although there are exceptions, of course).

My favorite resource for finding a therapist is the Psychology Today therapist finder. Every therapist I know in private practice has a Psychology Today profile, and you can use a dozen filters (insurance, primary problem, LGBTQ+ allied, etc.) to help narrow your search.
Monarch is a lesser-known therapist finder tool offered for therapist who use Simple Practice as their EHR. Monarch offers less information about each therapist than Psychology Today, but if you struggle with analysis paralysis when presented with too many options, Monarch is helpful for narrowing down the amount of information and providers you are presented with. It also has a handy built-in scheduling tool that makes it easy to book a session without having to make a phone call.
This Fat Mental Health Directory is a relatively new but very cool resource, especially for folks who are in eating disorder recovery or are looking for a self-identified weight-neutral or body liberation-oriented provider. (I’ve been meaning to create a profile on this directory for months but haven’t gotten around to it.)
If you are uninsured or under-insured, Open Path Collective is a resource that connects clients with therapists who offer low-fee or sliding scale sessions ($40 - $70 a session, after a $65 joining fee). I don’t have personal experience with Open Path Collective so I can’t attest to the quality, but it seems like a resource worth checking out if you need a therapist and don’t have insurance or have a prohibitively high deductible.
Finding a therapist who is a person of color can be especially challenging because the profession remains overwhelmingly white. This Clinicians of Color directory is worth checking out. There were only six therapists in this directory for the Seattle area, but this seems to have more robust listings in places like New York and D.C. If you have a favorite directory for non-white therapists, please share it in the comments.
If you want to see someone in-person, I would use Google Maps to search for “therapy” as this can help you find small group practices near you that have offices for in-person visits. In my experience, small group practices tend to be selective about the therapists they hire and can be collegial and supportive places to work, with far less pressure than corporate healthcare systems. Rather than contacting individual therapists, you can usually reach out to a group practice and have access to several providers who might be a good fit for you. (If you’re in the Seattle area and want my recommendations for my favorite local group practices, let me know in the comments and I will link to them.)
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Consider telehealth

Most people are open to telehealth at this point, but some people still want to see a therapist in person. Unless there is a concrete reason why you need in-person visits (for example, you don’t have a private space to do a therapy session, or you are looking for therapy for a young child), I would encourage you to try out telehealth before ruling it out because you will have more therapists to choose from. My clients who were initially resistant to doing telehealth ended up unanimously preferring telehealth to in-person visits when I briefly went back to the office in 2021. I don’t have an in-person office now because I see clients all over the state and there is not enough demand to justify the expense. Occasionally technological glitches interrupt a telehealth session, but for clients, the convenience of telehealth almost always outweighs the benefits of being seen in-person. Having practiced both ways, I would say that I lose a little bit of information since I can’t see a person’s full body language, and I can’t hand them my basket of fidgets when I see them wringing their hands. Otherwise, the experience is essentially the same, without the travel time to get to and from therapy.

Consider using out-of-network benefits

I am in-network with a handful of insurance plans, but there are dozens of insurers out there that I am not in-network with. Over time, I have dropped insurance carriers who were a pain to work with or who refused to pay me a competitive reimbursement rate. Not everyone has out-of-network benefits, but if you do, consider using them. Many of the most successful therapists run a cash-only practice, meaning that they are paid directly by the client for the session, and clients can submit a superbill to their insurance company for reimbursement. There are a lot of reasons why therapists do this which I will cover in a future post about the myth that therapists are rich (spoiler: we’re not). If you have the means to pay out-of-pocket and the bandwidth to submit claims for reimbursement, don’t rule out a therapist who runs a cash-only practice. The old adage that you get what you pay for is often true of therapy.

In my practice, I offer courtesy billing for clients who are out-of-network, meaning that I will submit the claim on a client’s behalf and then charge them the difference after their insurance pays me. I started doing this to make therapy more accessible for out-of-network clients, but not every therapist is willing to do the additional administrative work this involves, or take the risk of not getting paid for the session if the insurance doesn’t cover it and the client ghosts them.

What to watch out for

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad therapists out there. At best, these therapists are ineffective and will waste your time and money. At worst, they can cause serious harm. I can write a future post about what to watch out for and signs it’s time to fire your therapist (let me know in the comments if you want to read this). In the interest of keeping this post a reasonable length, I will limit my advice to this: trust your gut. This is especially hard for women who have been socialized to put other people’s needs above their own, and who are worried about offending a therapist by firing them. Please do not stay in ineffective or harmful therapy because you are being polite and avoiding conflict. Even the best therapists will say the wrong thing sometimes or have an off day, but if your intuition is telling you that this therapist is not right for you, doesn’t understand you, or they consistently say things that are hurtful or obtuse, don’t stick around.

Exercise extra caution before starting couples therapy

Some great writers on Substack have covered the drawbacks of couples counseling. To summarize: It’s a minefield. Read/listen to these before you spend time and money on couples counseling: