Is it normal for a therapist to text you?

Some therapists communicate with clients by text, others do not. I encourage my clients to text me between sessions, particularly if they are reaching out with a scheduling issue, question, etc. If a therapist isn’t comfortable with text as a form of communication, they should let you know.

Can you text your therapist between sessions?

You can text your therapist anytime. They may not reply immediately, especially if you text late at night or in the small hours of the morning, but you can usually expect a response within a day. You can also request a “live text” session when you exchange texts with your therapist in real time.

Should texting be part of the psychotherapy toolkit?

“They definitely prefer texting, and I see my job as forming an alliance with them.” Not all mental health practitioners are ready to embrace texting, though. Little research and no consensus exist about whether this new technology is effective as part of the psychotherapy toolkit, and there are few official guidelines.

Can texting help treat mental illness?

As a child and adolescent psychiatrist at New York University, she relies on texting alongside pills and talk therapy to coax her patients from the brink of mental breakdown. “For them, picking up the phone and making a phone call is quite foreign,” MacMillan said. “They definitely prefer texting, and I see my job as forming an alliance with them.”

Should mental health professionals text for help?

For mental health professionals, beyond the concerns about misinterpretation and overdependence, there is the worry that they could miss an all-important text for help if they’re out of reach or if their phone is dead. Even those therapists who text with their patients every day often won’t wake up to the ping of an incoming message.

Should you text your patients before performing surgery?

The risks are serious enough that Gorrindo urges clinicians to discuss the issue before they begin to text with their patients, the way a surgeon would talk through the pros and cons of an operation. “Almost like an informed consent,” he said. Part of that discussion could be about privacy.