Welcome to Rate My Therapist

Rate My Therapist allows clients to share ratings about their sessions with therapists. Visitors can also search for therapists based on ratings across different skills. You can search by therapist name, expertise, or location.

This website is still in beta and continues to expand. Users are encouraged to submit ratings to help improve accuracy and usefulness. For questions or concerns, you can reach us by email at info@ratemytherapist.com.

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What is the Purpose of this site?

This site allows clients who use psychotherapy and counseling services to rate their experiences with licensed mental health professionals. Most industries provide structured feedback, but psychotherapy lacks a widely used, neutral, and anonymous rating system with consistent evaluation criteria.

Rate My Therapist collects client ratings on therapy sessions and counseling experiences. These reviews help other users compare providers, treatment approaches, and areas of expertise when selecting a therapist. The site supports informed decision-making but should not replace professional guidance. Clients are encouraged to consult primary care doctors, insurance networks, and trusted healthcare resources when choosing mental health providers.

Approach & Values

Allowing unverified, narrative-based evaluations for professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and therapists carries risks. Rate My Therapist addresses this by offering a standardized and consistent system for reviewing licensed mental health providers.

Our approach helps prospective clients access useful information when considering therapy. User-generated ratings evaluate therapists on accessibility, empathy, skillfulness, helpfulness, and overall session experience. Clients remain fully anonymous, and the platform does not collect or track personal details beyond submitted ratings.

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FAQ

Rate My Therapist was established in 2020.

The intent of Rate My Therapist is to help clients and potential clients locate therapist that have high ratings provided by others who have used their service. It is not meant to endorse or disapprove of any therapist or the work they are doing. One should always consult with therapist, primary care physicians and others to help make the decision to pursue therapy with a specific therapist or counselor.

The questions and areas of inquiry are meant to be specific and useful enough to help somebody understand another person’s experience with that counselor. We do not allow a comment section in an attempt to provide some inter-rater reliability and avoid unhelpful personal and off-topic comments. Therapy is a highly personal experience. One person’s experience and rating don’t necessarily indicate the accuracy of another person’s experience or future experience. Nor does it imply the skill, education, or ethics of any particular therapist. It is merely a personal opinion expressed by clients for informational purposes only.

Only previous clients of a therapist may rate that therapist on Rate My Therapist. We shall attempt a validation process to ensure that clients providing ratings for therapist have in fact had a past professional, therapeutic relationship with the therapist.

Ratings are immediately added to the existing database of past ratings and become part of the averages for the rated therapist.

The intent of the site is to provide honest feedback from clients to help others make decisions about a therapist.

We have tried to make this site as intuitive as possible. Users can search for a therapist by name and see how they were rated by other clients.

Users can rate a therapist by using the Rate My Therapist chatbot.

Ratings can be removed after having been identified as originating from a source other than the client of the therapist they are rating (spamming of ratings, also called “astroturfing” for instance). Remember, rate the therapist only once!

If you’ve had a bad experience with a therapist, rating a therapist in all the categories in an honest fashion will help others know more about strengths and weaknesses of that therapist. Giving negative ratings in all areas because of one bad experience in one category may feel good but does not help prospective clients understand the complete experience clients have with that therapist.

We hope that both potential clients and therapists find the information useful.

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Rate My Therapist Guidelines

Rate My Therapist owns and operates this platform under its Terms of Use Agreement. The site collects user-generated ratings of therapists based on accessibility, empathy, skillfulness, helpfulness, and overall client experience.

Each rating question focuses on specific aspects of therapy to provide meaningful insights into a client’s session. The platform does not include a comment section to support inter-rater reliability and to limit irrelevant or personal remarks. Only verified clients may submit ratings, and the system includes a feature to confirm that reviews come from individuals who worked with the therapist they evaluate.

Rate My Therapist Guidelines and Terms of Use:

  • Provide honest and objective ratings of your therapist and therapy experience.
  • Use the categories accessibility, helpfulness, empathy, skillfulness, and overall client experience when submitting feedback.
  • Focus only on the therapist’s professional abilities.
  • Submit only one rating per therapist.
  • Post a rating only if you have been an actual client of that therapist.
  • The site may remove ratings that appear inappropriate, impersonate others, or violate the Site Guidelines and Terms of Use Agreement.

Read More

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Terms of Use Agreement

By using Rate My Therapist uses agree to:

  • Submit honest and objective assessments of therapists and therapy experiences.
  • Use the categories accessibility, empathy, helpfulness, skillfulness, and overall client experience when providing ratings.
  • Focus ratings only on the therapist’s professional skills and conduct
  • Post only one rating per therapist.
  • Submit a rating only if they have been a client of that therapist.
  • Accept that the site may remove ratings considered inappropriate, impersonating, or violating the Site Guidelines and Terms of Use Agreement.

Therapist FAQs

We remove ratings if one of our automated spam filters thinks there were multiple ratings coming from the same source. When we detect this, we will try to remove the duplicate ratings.

We generally do not remove ratings. This site is for people to report on their experiences.

But one of these ratings is false and it's hurting my business. I want to send you a letter demanding that it be removed.” - We do not accept demand letters because it is not our role to determine whether a review is true or false. You might dispute the truth of a review, but just because you're disputing it does not necessarily make it false.

“If you won't accept a demand letter, I have no choice but to sue you.” - The Communications Decency Act (the “CDA”) protects the provider from liability for the statements of others on this website: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 47 U.S.C. § 230. Federal courts have applied this standard to its terms: “By its plain language, Section 230 creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service.” Reran v. AOL, 129 F.3d 327, 330 (4th Cir. 1997).

The ratings on this site are provided by our users, not by us. Thus, under the CDA, we are not the “publisher or speaker” of the ratings, even if they contain false information, and we are not liable for defamation, libel, fraud or any other tort claim based on such activity.

“I think my demand letter would put you on notice that the review is false and defamatory. That makes you liable.” -
Zeran,129 F.3d at 227, and the cases following it uniformly hold that it is not up to us to determine whether your demand letter is correct or the review is correct.

But you lost your CDA immunity by aggregating the user ratings into an average.” - The most instructive case on aggregate ratings is the California Court of Appeals decision in Gentry v. eBay, which held that such ratings do not transform a site into an information content provider. 99 Cal. App. 4th 816, 834 (Cal. App. 2002).

I'm going to sue you anyway. Taking down the review is cheaper than paying a lawyer.” - Twenty-eight states have passed strict anti- SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) Laws, authorizing expedited motions to dismiss and giving rise to counterclaims seeking attorneys' fees and liquidated damages.

I'm not in the United States, and I'm going to sue you in my own jurisdiction.” - The United States has enacted strict laws protecting US companies from lawsuits brought in foreign jurisdictions. Even if you win a judgment under your local laws, it will not be enforceable in the United States. See, SPEECH Act of 2010.

I'm planning to pose as a client and rate myself to increase my overall rating.” - We use automated algorithms and human moderators to detect and remove phony reviews. Also, posing as a client or hiring a firm to post ratings is a practice known as “astroturfing,” and is illegal. If you are caught, you could be liable for damages.

The Supreme Court of the United States has held that anonymity of speech is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution (see McIntyre v. Ohio, 514 U.S. at 337; Talley v. State of California, 362 U.S. 60), also see here.

United States courts have consistently recognized that the right to speak anonymously extends to speech on the Internet (see Doe v. 2theMart.com and Doe v. Cahill).

Rate My Therapist does not keep records of individuals providing the ratings.

Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 5, 2024

Psychtech, Inc., LLC ("us", "we", or "our") operates the www.ratemytherapist.com My Therapist website and the RateMyTherapist Chatbot applications (the "Service").

This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data.

The Service does not collect or store any personal or identifying data of the users.

We use your ratings to provide aggregate information to others about therapists. By using the www.ratemytherapist.com My Therapist, you agree to the Guidelines and Terms of Use Agreement.