Several people have emailed me asking for advice finding a therapist, and I worry I haven’t been much help. One of the advantages of being a psychiatrist is not having to worry about finding a psychiatrist. I know a few people in southern Michigan personally and can give some advice if you live there; outside that I’m stuck.
Luckily Gruntled and Hinged just wrote a good series of articles on how to find and contact a therapist for mental health problems. I’ll be referring those kinds of questions there in the future.
But I’ll also open up one question to anyone who can help: anyone want to volunteer the name of a good therapist whom they would recommend to other readers? Clearly geography is an issue here, so I would be most interested in knowing about tele-therapists or people in the Bay Area / New York City where a lot of SSC readers tend to congregate.
Bay Area:
Dr. Judith Sachs (recommended by David Chapman)
New York City:
Deb Shapiro (recommended by jayshap)
Greater Boston:
Integrative Psychology (recommended by Hibiscus)
Life Changes Group (recommended by Hibiscus)
Ann Arbor:
Rebecca Hatton (recommended by Paul Torek)
[Ask Scott privately for psychiatrist recommendations in Ann Arbor / Detroit]
Therapist psychotherapy is necessary
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I’m currently shopping for new therapist in the NYC area after being informed that my current one will be moving, and while I have some promising leads, I don’t personally know of any good therapists through first-hand experience.
I’ll be curious to hear what others have to say.
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If it’s not too uncouth to plug for family…
My mother is a licensed therapist and social worker, I think her title is LCSW. She lives in Hollis (Queens), but will travel to any borough or Long Island to see clients. Lord knows we have our issues, but I can vouch for her empathy, intelligence, and open-mindedness.
Her profile has a passage she wrote that gives a good sense of what she’s about: http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/name/Deb_Shapiro_LCSW_Hollis_New+York_117273
Her own website offers further details and a, umm, *unique* aesthetic:
http://getsomehelp.org/
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>One of the advantages of being a psychiatrist is not having to worry about finding a psychiatrist
Eh? You’re allowed to prescribe yourself stuff?
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I assume he can’t literally treat himself, but inevitably being a psychiatrist involves having easy ways to locate large numbers of others.
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Psychiatrist-dar?
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As the Gruntled & Hinged post partly explains, “licensed therapist” is not a specific thing. When I looked into who does mental health care in Massachusetts, the names of the professions I could find were (in order of frequency): social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, various kinds of nurses, licensed mental health counselors, licensed marriage and family therapists, and licensed clinical mental health counselors. I assume that none of the nurses and few of the psychiatrists are doing talk therapy, though. It seems that social workers do the plurality of psychotherapy (at least where I live).
http://thewholesky.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/who-does-behavioral-health-care/
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I have a different request:
I very rarely go to see a doctor, and I move around a lot, and so when I see a physician I am almost always essentially a stranger to them.
My interactions with various medical professionals almost always start in a very patronizing and condescending fashion, with them talking to me as if I am a child.
I understand there are perfectly good reasons for them to do this, I don’t fault them for it.
But I do want them to stop it with me as quickly as possible.
I want them to treat me as – if not as an ‘equal’ – then at least an intelligent, educated professional with some decent lay understanding of medicine and biology, capable of understanding nuances (do this, unless this, except when that) and reliable in terms of complying with simple instructions. Basically, I want them to understand that I am not in the category of patients that justifies the elementary school approach.
My question for you is whether you have any good advice about the quickest, most effective, and most polite way to accomplish this goal. I once tried to be frank and direct about this and I judges that this was not well-received, which is of course typical and predictable. I’ve had more success with immediately dropping or hinting about my profession. Professional dress – business casual or above – also seems to matter.
Where I’ve had the least luck, no matter what I do, is anything dealing with OB / Maternity. The docs in those fields just don’t seem to be able to snap out of patronizing mode. But if you know any tricks, I’d be very grateful if you could share them with the group.
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Working for the institution seems to help. My wife is in IT at (major medical group) and gets the sort of treatment you’re asking about from her doctors.
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I really sympathize with the question, but I don’t have a great answer.
There’s no reason being frank and direct shouldn’t work beyond the doctor being a rude person. A site like ratemds.com or healthgrades.com might help you find less rude doctors.
And I’ve never tried this, but most doctors follow a standard medical history format. If you write up your history in the standard format and hand it to them, it might save them some time and signal that you’re pretty experienced with this. But this is just a guess, and again they might be needlessly rude and say “that’s not the way we do things here”.
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Note that this has a pretty big failure mode. I used to try this, until I asked a friend who was training to be a medical professional why they thought that it seemed to generally INCREASE the level of condescension. I will paraphrase their explanation:
“Well, my resident says that there’s ultimately two kinds of patients – the kind who don’t know anything about medicine, and the kind who know too much about medicine. The first kind are dumb but easily manageable, and the second kind you need to get rid of as quickly as possible, because they’re just shopping around for drugs or treatment or attention or whatever.”
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Possible. Almost all my experience has been in a hospital, where there’s usually a presumption of “actually sick”. It’s possible in a clinic setting the lack of that presumption might cause different responses.
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Luck of the draw seems to be it; out of four consultants I had appointments with for various matters that all hit me at once, one of them treated me like a human being.
The others ranged from ‘conveyor belt’ (get her out of here as fast as possible) to pig-ignorant (I don’t say boo to a goose in public, but this guy was so bad I did indeed storm out after ten minutes).
And yes – the gynaecologists were the worst, not necessarily in attitude, but plain not listening:
Scene: Examination room
Persons: Consultant, nurse, the patient (me)
Location: In the single most embarrassing position possible – on the flat of my back with my legs in the stirrups and the doctor preparing to go in .
Me (because I’ve been down this road before): Um, you’re going to need the large speculum
Him (not even listening but attempting to force implement in)
Him: Nurse, this isn’t working. Do we have the large speculum?
Nurse: They’re on order, but they won’t be here till Monday
Exit doctor and nurse to find some implement they can use, leaving your obedient servant naked from the waist down on public display.
Yeah, that wasn’t at all an unpleasant experience!
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Stepping in to second Scott–the single thing that has worked best for me is repeatedly using the language at therapists back at them. I got both my undergraduate degrees in effectively applied psychology and theoretical psych. Barring that fairly unreasonable suggestion, here are some ideas:
-books for professionals (ie, training manuals, textbooks, guides). They use the language and phrasing you’ll be imitating
-walking in with your health data already. I mentioned this in the Guide already, but showing up with answers to questions before they were asked forced the practitioners to regroup and seemed to jar them out of patterns of talking (the same patterns that felt condescending. The ability to say flatly “actually, I’ve got the answer to that right here” worked great at disrupting the repetitive and patronizing habit.
-I am not entirely sure how much of this is just making people perceive me as older, but getting excessively formal has served me well. “Actually, I was given to understand that…” rather than “the nurse told me…” etc etc etc.
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Unrelated to the topic, but: something seems wrong with this study:
Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity May Not Exist.
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In the Bay Area, I would recommend Dr Judith Sachs (415-346-1302).
She has an informal specialization in Aspergers-y folks, helping both with romantic relationships and work issues (corporate politics, etc).
For readers of this blog, one difficulty in finding a good therapist may be discovering that you are smarter than most. That’s pretty unlikely in her case!
She has offices in both San Francisco and Oakland. I don’t remember exactly, but my memory is that she’s a PhD clinical neuropsychologist, if formal qualifications count, and has been practicing for about 20 years.
Disclaimer: she’s a friend, and I haven’t been treated by her. However, she’s given me a great deal of good advice about interpersonal situations over the years, and she’s insightful and caring.
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I have recommendations for Greater Boston: Integrative Psychology (http://integrativepsychologist.com/contact/) in Arlington, and Life Changes Group (http://lifechangesgroup.com/) in Cambridge. I’ve had good experiences with intelligent, insightful, non-condescending therapists at both (although Life Changes is a group of them, so I haven’t had personal interactions with all).
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My wife is a licensed psychologist in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. Here’s the most informative page of her website. Besides having the smarts to marry me :D, she’s committed to helping people improve and move on, rather than spending a fortune on perpetual maintenance.
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Unrelated, and I don’t know how much you want to mess with your website. Another blogger I read found that adding a “Confirm you are not a robot” checkbox reduced spam significantly.
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Spambots might try to check/uncheck checkboxes randomly, but I found that a custom text field with the answer beside it (“Are you a spambot? Hint: say no“) cut out 100% of my spam. Obviously it wouldn’t work against manual spammers or anyone writing a spambot specifically aimed at your site, but all of your spam seems to be general-purpose bots so that doesn’t matter.
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So I was about to ask if there was a WordPress plugin for this.
Then I realized that if there was commonly used plugin that all WordPress sites had, then spambots would be programmed to understand it and check the box.
Then I decided that there should be a couple hundred different plugins, and people should try to choose one of them at random.
Then I realized it would be too easy to just make a list of all hundred plugins and give that to a spambot. You would have to come up with some novel way of having a couple of systems that nevertheless interacted in a different way for each blog.
Then I realized I was reinventing the HLA system.
I wonder how long it will be before computer security companies start recruiting immunologists.
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Dr. Elke Rechberger is an excellent Psychologist located in the Los Angeles area. (626) 394-3015
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