New York, fwiw. And yes, I'm functional in a "get out of bed every day and go to work and put on a good front" sense, and would prefer to avoid medication if possible.
Yeah, that's the site that returned an intractable list of ~2500 options in NYC, and that caused me to shut down the last couple times I looked for help.
Thank you for this suggestion. It's the closest I've seen to far to a solution. A sad shortage of providers who take my insurance, but the UI made it otherwise easy to narrow down to a manageable number of options.
I'm really not kidding. The range of usefulness of therapists is so large that "any therapist is a good starting point" usually works. It's better when you can ask friends, but if you can't, any therapist will do.
I work in the mental health space (we make practice management systems for therapists) and I couldn’t disagree more. The quality of therapists varies so widely that frankly some of them, I can’t imagine how they ever got licensed.
Working in the industry, would you have any specific suggestions for someone who feels overwhelmed to winnow the options from 1000-ish to under a dozen?
As a person who recently had to do this, my suggestion would be to find someone close to either your home or work. Next would be to find someone of the gender you prefer (I prefer same-sex), then find someone in the age group you're in. I've had good luck using this heuristic to whittle down the list to a few names.
Then go for a brief session with each of them. You should pick the person you feel most comfortable talking to EASILY. This person should be someone you don't feel judged or threatened by. You should be able to understand them clearly and they you.
Think about it like it's a date. In a way, it kinda is.
Indeed, you both have to click, as a therapist, I won't receive anyone I feel I couldn't work with sincerely (no judging and lovingly). In those cases I would always recommend someone I feel would be better suited.
I'm saying the same thing. I'm also saying that without a personal referral, you can't tell. (Hence my upstream recommendation of having a trial session and asking for referrals)
But outside of "pick one and start there", what would you recommend if somebody can't get a recommendation from friends/family? How do you find a decent practitioner?
Yes, exactly. I wish I could pop my location and insurance plan into a website, and get back a list of 3 nearby providers who are accepting new patients - even better, links to a site where one can schedule appointsments with each of them.
Google, however, is prohibitive. You end up having to either comb through thousands of individual results to find ones that are nearby and take your insurance, or you end up on an aggregator site with literally thousands (at least in NYC) of matches and the same problem with slightly more structured data.
It's just so daunting to make any decision when faced with too much data and insufficient information on how to use that data, that the depressive brain just kind of shuts down and says "fuck it, I can't deal with this now."
Not sure if you are in the US, but Zocdoc does exactly that thing. Enter location, doctor type and insurance, it will show you the list of all doctors/therapists and you can even sort by rating and availability.
