Therapy is an incredible healing modality that can help people change their lives. What’s most important is the trust, comfortability, and openness a client feels with their therapist. Know your options, especially when it comes to your health.
Reasons Why Self-Pay Therapy is Gaining Popularity:
1. No diagnosis needed — You will be given a mental health diagnosis if you use health insurance for therapy; the only way around that is to self-pay (i.e., pay-by-pocket).
2. Increased privacy — The only ones who know you are in therapy is you and your provider; not you, your provider, and your insurance company, including the various departments that coordinate your benefits, review your medical utilization, process your claims, etc.
3. Flexibility in length and course of therapy — Only you and your provider collaborate on treatment length and frequency of sessions in order to serve you, the client, with transparency, integrity, and complete care.
4. Energy Exchange — Energy exchanges result when both parties give and receive (i.e., you give payment and receive care; your provider gives care and receives payment). This is a mutually respectful and beneficial process. Going through a separate payer disrupts this energy exchange because there is now a third party in the two-person therapy room.
5. Empowerment — You get to choose which provider you want to work with, providing their scope of practice reflects your needs. You do not need to filter whom you choose based on complexities related to whether that provider has an agreed-upon contract with your specific insurance company, as well as what your specific agreed-upon contract is with your insurance company.