What Maker Therapy is, and what it is not

01What this site does

There are tens of thousands of therapists taking clients online, and almost no way to read about one before you commit to a session. Platform listings are short, written to a template, and list clinical methods as bare acronyms that mean nothing unless you already know them.

Maker Therapy takes the public roster BetterHelp publishes and turns each listing into a page you can actually read: what that therapist works with, the methods they use explained in plain English, what happens between here and a first session, and questions worth asking them.

We are not affiliated with BetterHelp beyond an affiliate arrangement, we do not speak for them, and we have not met any of the therapists listed here.

02How a profile is built

A single automated pass reads BetterHelp's roster once a day and records what it said. Nothing on this site is submitted by a therapist, and nothing is edited by hand.

What is quoted from the source

• Name, credential and the state they are licensed in.
• The biography they wrote, reproduced whole - not summarised, not tightened, not rewritten in a house voice.
• The subjects they list as specialisms, and the clinical methods they list.
• Whether the listing currently shows them as open to new clients.

What is checked against another source

Licence numbers and NPI numbers are cross-checked against public registers, so a profile shows the credential the state board holds rather than only what the platform reported.

What we write ourselves

Three parts of each profile are ours, and every one of them says so on the page where it appears: the plain-English explanations of each clinical method, the walkthrough of what happens before a first session, and the suggested questions.

The method descriptions explain what the METHOD is, in general. They are never a claim about how a particular therapist runs a session, and they are labelled that way on every profile.

03What we deliberately do not do

No reviews or ratings

There is no way to verify that a review of a named clinician came from somebody who saw them. We would rather publish none than publish ones we cannot stand behind.

No paid placement

No therapist can pay to appear here, to rank higher, or to be removed. The order of results is set by the filters you choose and nothing else.

No bookings

We hold no calendar, take no appointments and process no payments. Every route to a session goes through BetterHelp.

No clinical records

We never see, store or transmit anything about your health. What you type into BetterHelp stays with BetterHelp.

No invented facts

A field the roster does not carry is left off the page rather than filled with a placeholder. A shorter true profile is better than a complete invented one.

04How this is paid for

Maker Therapy is free to use and carries no advertising. When somebody starts therapy through a link on this site, BetterHelp pays us a commission.

That arrangement pays for the site, and it is worth being plain about what it does and does not influence. It does not change what you pay - BetterHelp charges the same whether you arrive through us or type their address directly. It does not affect who appears here: the roster is read the same way whether anybody clicks or not. And it does not affect the order results appear in.

What it does mean is that we have a commercial interest in you clicking through. That is exactly why there are no reviews, no rankings and no scores on this site - they would be the easiest thing to quietly tilt.

05When something is wrong

The roster changes daily and we are reading somebody else's data. A profile can be out of date, a licence can have been renewed, and a therapist can have left the platform between our last read and your visit.

Every profile has a link to report a problem, and it goes to a person. If you are the therapist and you want your listing corrected or removed from this site, say so and it will be done - you do not have to explain why.