How To Find a Therapist

Editor’s preface: I’m Carmel—I’ve been editing Every behind-the-scenes in recent months, while Kate Lee is on maternity leave. You may have met me in my past lives at Figma (the early years) or as a startups reporter (at Recode, Gigaom, and Pando). Despite my tech and media background, my friends always joke I should've become a therapist. Human psychology is a favorite subject of mine, and I’ve been inspired by Every's recent mental health essays to publish a few of my own posts on the topic.

Below is a guide for vetting therapists that I initially wrote during the pandemic (for my old colleagues at Figma). I always meant to expand it and publish it publicly, and Every feels like the right audience for it! Would love to hear about your own experiences therapist hunting in comments.

Therapy has been having its mainstream moment in the wake of the pandemic. The shark has been jumped. I realized it when high school friends from home started dropping words like “codependency” and “EMDR.” 

But despite its rise in popularity, anyone new to therapy still faces a daunting job getting started. It’s hard to know how to go about finding therapists, let alone evaluating whether they’re the right fit for you. Good therapists practice some witch’s brew of experience and intuition. People’s needs evolve over time, so the therapist that works for them at first may not be a fit a decade later. 

In the wake of the pandemic I’ve had a lot of friends and colleagues ask for advice on navigating through this maze. I’ve seen a lot of therapists through the years, so I learned how to find new ones through trial-and-error. It was a process of blood, sweat and tears (mostly tears).