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Do you have a question for a licensed mental health professional, and you don’t have time to wait? Now you can put your questions to a counselor, therapist or psychologist and receive a personal reply online right now. Note that links provided here to commercial services represent an informed editorial recommendation of services which pay this site a referral fee when those services are used.

Our free online psychologist service at Ask the Psychologist used to publish single replies to a small number of the many questions we received every day, and private practices like the online therapy service we formerly provided at one of our spin-off sites work with a very limited number of clients at a time. But if you’d like some quicker feedback from a psychologist or other licensed mental health professional — without a waiting list — it may be easier than you think, thanks to reliable third party options.

Top Recommendations for Online Mental Health Providers

We’ve recently revised our top recommendation for online mental health providers, and we now offer suggestions in two different categories.

First, we understand that sometimes you’re not looking for an extended engagement or a deep therapeutic relationship. Instead, you’d just like to get a question answered — but in a way that is specific to you and your situation. To get a question answered by a qualified mental health professional, a very low cost option enables you to connect with one of thousands of experts in mental health who can answer any question you’d like to leave via a private text chat box:

On the other hand, for more in-depth weekly engagement, together with unlimited messaging, and if you’re interested specifically in online CBT, there are several web-only services available, most of which nowadays charge a fee. This particular one includes a dedicated online team of consultant therapists, cognitive behavioral therapists, related practitioners and support staff. They offer a combination of direct personal support and web-based tools and resources:

Of course, you can cancel this service at any time, for any reason, with no questions asked, so it’s the type of thing you can try out for a time to see how it suits you and simply discontinue if it isn’t for you.

Options That We No Longer Recommend

A couple of options which formerly featured on this page no longer make the cut for our recommendation.

Our Original Commercial Service Recommendation

A phone-based or chat-based service which charged by the minute used to be one of our recommendations for quick, real time feedback across a range of specialist areas.

Back in 2005 or 2006, we had accepted a brief advertising placement from them, but their ads were garish and distracting, the service was over-run with online psychics, and after a short time I concluded that the folks in charge weren’t particularly well tuned in to (or interested in) the specific needs of people looking for solid and well-grounded feedback on psychological or general mental health issues. We dropped the ad placement when the contract was finished, and it wasn’t renewed. We did keep an eye on the company, though, in case it eventually matured into the type of service we’d be happy working with again.

A few years later, it was taken over by a much larger company that had originally specialised in providing live customer support systems — you’ve probably seen their live customer support icons on merchant sites of all kinds. There was still a legacy of hundreds of online psychics (no offense if you’re into that sort of thing, and probably a lot of folks who call themselves psychics are pretty psychologically insightful, but I certainly would not call them online mental health professionals), but the company did put a serious and sustained effort into building up its team of fully-qualified, licensed, and genuinely non-psychic mental health professionals.

More recently, however, it’s changed hands again, and the acquirer seems intent on returning to the psychic roots that turned us off nearly two decades ago — so we won’t be recommending them for now.

The Rudderless Alternative

For a short while, we suggested an alternative from the service which many consider to be the number two in the market. Unfortunately, after going public via a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), the original founders were pushed out, many of the top team left, and the business began to flounder. It’s now unclear how seriously they take the consumer space, where they have all but lost the race to the company which is now unfortunately the market leader (see below). I have no doubt they can still connect you with many fine therapists, but the ship is so clearly adrift right now that it’s hard to recommend.

The Most Shocking Former Service Recommendation

We previously recommended here and on other sites, and in fact actively promoted for a number of years, another service which has blanketed both the internet and real life with advertisements. In some ways, it seemed to be very high quality and worthwhile, and I have no doubt the service did help many people. They certainly persuaded a very large number of otherwise sensible mental health professionals to work with them (at last count, over twenty thousand), and by most accounts they are now the largest provider around. However, their unapologetic public reaction to being found by an FTC investigation to have shared personal client information with third parties such as Facebook without client consent — and their subsequent payment of a large financial penalty as a result — left us more than a little dubious. Our relationship with them finally ended rather abruptly when we commented that it really was not at all necessary for them to share with us personal information about individuals referred by us who went on to become clients, and that we’d really prefer they stopped doing it. Boom! Less than one business day after making the suggestion to stop sharing personal client information with us, they terminated our advertising partnership entirely. Apparently that was a suggestion which they really didn’t want to hear, so as it stands now, I can only recommend avoiding the service entirely. As far as I am aware, they continue to share personal client information with partners who advertise their service.

Back to the Good Options!

It would be a shame if ethically dubious actions from large publicly traded companies fixated on their bottom lines were to taint the field as a whole. Just click to return to the top suggestions we offered at the start of this page.

All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .

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