Finding a therapist

April 20, 2018 3:06 AM

What are the magic words I need to use to get a therapist to call me back?

I need a therapist. I have called 10 therapists over the last two months and not a single one has returned my call. I have found them on Psychology Today's website and they all say they are accepting new patients and that they take my insurance. I typically call on a Tuesday or Wednesday in the morning and leave a message with my name, phone number, the town I live in, and profession. I say I am looking for a new therapist and that I can be reached anytime. I repeat my phone number, which is an out-of-state number, but I have told them that I live in town so I don't think that's it. I wait a week and call back and say I am following up in my second message. I also call a new therapist that day. This week I got fed up and called four in a row on one day. Still nothing.

I'm convinced I'm doing something wrong in this interaction because not a single one has returned my calls. I'm struggling and have heard stories from friends where they call one person and find a therapist who will see them that day, even though they aren't in danger or in an urgent situation. (I would argue my situation is increasingly urgent; I don't think I've ever been this bad.) I think I sound friendly on the phone.

This seems so odd that I am convinced it's something I am doing or not doing. What should I do?

posted by sockermom to Health & Fitness (25 answers total)

Your employer may have an EAP, employee assistance plan. They would have a list of covered providers. Your health insurance company may also have such a list. The psychology today records are probably old, maybe those people are not in practice. It's incredibly unprofessional but it's not uncommon.
posted by theora55 at 3:17 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've had the same issue and had better luck contacting group practices. Maybe try that? It may also feel good to contact Psychology Today and let them know what's going on. I would imagine many people have similar frustration with this.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 4:21 AM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Maybe Psychology Today's website isn't current? (It's still rude that they don't call you back even if they aren't accepting new patients!) Does your insurance have a website that lets you search for therapists?
posted by callmejay at 4:25 AM on April 20, 2018

Response by poster: To clarify, I have visited the individual websites for most of the people I'm calling and they do all appear to be still in practice, and many of them say they are accepting new patients on their personal websites. I am wondering what I should be saying (or not saying) in my message to get a call back.
posted by sockermom at 4:27 AM on April 20, 2018

I wish I knew an effective way to find a therapist but I can confirm that calling people from Psychology Today resulted in a lot of unreturned messages for me too. You're not doing anything wrong.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 4:32 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Seconding the EAP route. Therapists that participate in an EAP are (usually) proactively seeking new clients. I’ve had trouble getting in with a therapist through cold calling, but every therapist I’ve called through an EAP called me back.

Other ways that I’ve had high success in getting into a therapist include a referral from my primary care physician, and also a local (county level) mental health hotline.
posted by Doc_Sock at 4:40 AM on April 20, 2018

This is a hunch, but maybe try email. Most of the providers I've dealt with don't have an assistant and so have to do their own administrative stuff in addition to seeing clients. Phone calls are generally made during business hours, when they are seeing clients. Emails can be returned at any time.
posted by bunderful at 4:48 AM on April 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

Seconding group practice. Or if there’s a university near you, see if they have a program where they see clients. Some individual therapists are terrible at administrative stuff (mine is), and a group is more likely to have someone whose job is handling appointments. There aren’t any magic words.
posted by FencingGal at 5:25 AM on April 20, 2018

Are you getting phone calls from other people at this number? Voicemails? Ten seems like too many for this to be due to some interpersonal quirk, and I doubt that you are doing something wrong anyway. So I'd first rule out technical issues with your phone service.

And even if web sites get out of date, when medical providers are not taking new patients they usually say so on their voicemail message, in my experience.
posted by grouse at 5:26 AM on April 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I’ve had better luck with email and with asking for a referral if they are full. (Also I don’t know if this is related, but a few therapist friends have reported that their practice has gotten really overloaded in the past year or so, so there might be something larger going on right now.)
posted by tchemgrrl at 6:06 AM on April 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Your question (what should I say so people call me back) is going unanswered here, which is probably frustrating. But the reason why people aren’t answering your question is because it sounds like you’re doing everything right! I’m a busy self-employed body worker without an admin assistant, and sometimes when I’m slammed there are some calls that i don’t get to return (which, yes, is rude, but I’m doing the best that I can). A way you can increase your odds of getting a call back would be to get a recommendation from someone “my colleague Mary Smith recommended I call you; she thinks you are really brilliant and you have helped her so much” or if you don’t have a personal recommendation, you could say “I read the article on your website about “whatever” and got really excited because it totally resonated with what I’ve been going through and I thought it was really well written” or “Your website suggests you’re taking new patients right now - if that’s not the case, do you have any other therapists to suggest? I need to see someone soon because I’m not doing that well.”
To be clear, you shouldn’t NEED to do this in order to get a return call, but if I received any of these kinds of calls they would jump to the top of my return-this-call list (which might not be that flattering for me to say, but it’s true.)
posted by andreapandrea at 6:20 AM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

I don’t think it’s you at all, this does not seem unusual for this demographic.

If I were to get super tinfoil hatty, I might suggest dropping mention of your profession (I roughly remember it - healthcare services research?) when you leave your message (in case they imagine you’re secretly researching them??)... but that is bonkers and I really don’t think that’s the issue. Many therapists just don’t seem to abide by the same professional standards as everyone else.
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:23 AM on April 20, 2018

Ditto to this not seeming that unusual. Also, this reality is frustrating but it’s been my experience that sometimes therapists in private practice prefer self-pay clients vs insured ones. Dealing with insurance companies is a hassle for them (or they have to pay a company to handle the billing) and they end up making not that much. My therapist who charged probably $100+ for self-pay clients ended up getting maybe $65 from my copay + my insurance company combined.
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:39 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

My experience with EAP therapists has been one of not having calls returned - YMMV, of course. I highly recommend specifically seeking a group practice that will have staff dedicated to this stuff.

That said, you could perhaps try specifically adding, "If you're not accepting new patients, please call or text me back and let me know that." I'm not sure if it would help, but maybe? I also think you're on to the right idea with not putting your therapist search on hold for a week between calls; go ahead and keep having calls in to multiple therapists. If you find one you can schedule with and like, great, you can drop the others you're playing phone tag with then.

If you have friends/relatives/colleagues/support group peers/whatever who you're comfortable talking with about this stuff, I would also be asking for personal recommendations for therapists who are responsive.
posted by Stacey at 6:47 AM on April 20, 2018

Best answer: I don't have a solution, just chiming in to say that this has also been my experience. I don't know why it's happening, and it strikes me as incredibly unprofessional, but it does seem to be standard practice. In my case, I got the names both from my insurance company's directory and from the directory of the local Mental Health Association. Phone messages and emails are going unanswered even after two follow-up messages. It seems to be a recent development; when I was looking for a therapist a couple of years ago, my calls were returned promptly.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:31 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

If they have a contact or make an appointment form on the website I would fill that out. In my experience it seems to get into their “to do” list.
posted by Crystalinne at 7:37 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’ve had better luck with email and with asking for a referral if they are full.

We had a very hard time finding a therapist for my son, and what finally did the trick was I started calling and emailing therapists who highly rated but who did not actually seem to be taking new patients. I said "I understand you're not taking new patients, but I was hoping you could suggest some colleagues who would be a particularly good fit for [problem]."

I ended up getting two callbacks, one of who did actually have an opening (even though the website said they didn't).
posted by anastasiav at 9:24 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

As andreapandrea suggested, I have never once gotten a call back from a therapist/psychopharm unless I say specifically in the message, "Hi, Dr. So and So, my name is holborne; I'm calling because Ms./Dr. Such-and-Such referred me to you." So if you're looking for magic words, I think "Specific Proper Name, preferably of another health care professional, referred me to you" are the ones you're looking for.
posted by holborne at 9:38 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

10!!! with no callback or anything at all seems really unusual to me.

If your phone is indeed confirmed working correctly, is there a chance you have mushmouth when saying your phone number? I've experienced quite often that people who leave voice messages rush through their phone numbers in kind of a cadence, like they've said it so many times exactly the same way it becomes rote, and it's like they completely forget what it's like to hear a phone number on the other end.

When I leave voicemails I like to say "Hi, this is First Last. My phone number is one. two. three. four. five. six. seven. eight. nine. ten. I'm calling to..." It sounds REALLY weird and robotic, but if you make a clear pause after every single number you can avoid unintentional mushmouth.

Also, stating your phone number at the very beginning of the call means that once they listen to the whole message they can replay the message for only 5 seconds to get your contact details, instead of having to listen to the whole dang thing over again.
posted by phunniemee at 9:50 AM on April 20, 2018

Response by poster: Yeah, I was enunciating clearly and saying my number twice. I finally got one to call me back today after leaving quite a desperate sounding message where I said I had been looking for months with no luck, and I was hoping she could refer me if she wasn’t seeing new patients. She said she never got my first message, but she set up an appointment with me, so I hope this one works out. Thanks for the suggestions and help here.
posted by sockermom at 10:26 AM on April 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Just as a data point, when I used the Psychology Today website to find a therapist about a year and a half ago, I picked out four people who I thought looked possible and emailed them via the PT website and had a 100% response rate. Maybe it made a difference that I used email instead of phone? I do know that the phone numbers listed by Psychology Today aren't the people's "real" phone numbers; it's some kind of interface mediated by PT. Which the email channel probably is too, but maybe it works better? Don't really know, just thought I'd share in case it helps. I did not have any names to give as referral sources as people are suggesting above; I just said I needed someone and asked for them to contact me and they all responded, and that's how I got the therapist I have now -- who I like a lot. Best of luck to you.
posted by littlecatfeet at 11:55 AM on April 20, 2018

You don't need to leave information on your profession. Maybe they think it is some sort of spammy sales call when you do that? Just leave a message stating you are looking to make an appointment as a new patient and leave your name and number. That's it. Although it is also odd that not a one of these practices has a secretary that answers the phone when you call?
posted by TestamentToGrace at 12:53 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

TestamenttoGrace, it's not odd at all. The vast majority of therapists work alone; the only person to answer the phone is them.

This behavior is horrible and unprofessional, but really, would you truly want a therapist who does this? That said, I would switch to exclusively contacting them via email. I've had nothing but shitty experiences with therapists who don't have websites that explain their practice philosophy, and no one in 2018 should expect to be able to do business without using email and text. Rule out people who don't .
posted by Violet Hour at 2:13 PM on April 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've encountered the same problem. Two tips to improve response rate:
1. If calling, leave a brief voicemail message stating only your contact information and that you want to schedule an initial appointment. If you leave too much info on the message (nature of problem, how long you've been looking, insurance status) the therapist can decide to screen you out and not respond.

2. Use the email contact form direct from the Psychology Today listing. Much better response rate. I suspect PT offers a tracking & statistics tool that incentivizes the therapist's reply.
posted by Ardea alba at 6:01 AM on April 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

You can also try calling your insurance company. Tell them that you have called x people and not found anyone with an opening. They might be willing to help.
posted by metahawk at 2:47 PM on April 21, 2018