Policies, terms, and the law we are built around.

1. What this site is, and what it is not

TherapyCalifornia is an information service and, in a later phase, a listing directory. It is published by a collective of California therapists who pay a flat membership fee.

It is not a health care provider. We do not deliver therapy, diagnosis, treatment, case management, crisis counselling, or any clinical service. We are not a health plan, an insurer, a referral agency in the statutory sense, a licensed clinic, or a covered entity under HIPAA.

Nothing here is individual advice. The guides describe California law, insurance mechanics and clinical concepts in general terms. Your plan documents, your county's rules and your own clinician govern your situation, and they beat anything written here.

2. No therapist–client relationship

Reading this site, using a tool on it, joining a waitlist, or writing to us does not create a therapist–client relationship, a doctor–patient relationship, or any professional duty of care between you and anyone associated with this site. It also does not create legal privilege: what you send us is not a confidential clinical communication and is not protected by psychotherapist–patient privilege.

When the directory opens, a message sent through a therapist's listing goes to that therapist. The professional relationship, if one forms, is between you and them. We are not a party to it, we do not supervise it, and we do not receive the content of what you write.

3. Emergencies

This site is not monitored, and no one here is on call. If you are in danger or thinking about suicide, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free and answered 24 hours a day. If someone is in immediate physical danger, call 911. Every crisis line we can verify is on one page, deliberately kept free of navigation, tracking and anything else that could get in the way.

4. The self-check tools

The screenings on this site are the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 — public-domain instruments, used unmodified. They are educational. No questionnaire can diagnose anyone, including these: they measure how often you have had certain experiences over two weeks. A score is a starting point for a conversation with a clinician and nothing else. A low score does not mean you are fine, and a high score does not mean you have a disorder.

They run entirely in your browser. Your answers are not transmitted to us or to anyone, are not stored on a server, and are gone when you close the tab. The share links carry no answers.

5. How this is paid for, and the referral-fee law

The site is paid for by flat membership fees from participating therapists — one price, the same for everyone, month to month. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate revenue, and no sale of data.

California prohibits paying or receiving consideration for patient referrals (Business & Professions Code §650(a)). Since 1 January 2022 the statute has an express carve-out at §650(h): paying for internet-based advertising, appointment booking or "any service that provides information and resources to prospective patients" is not a referral — provided the service does not recommend or endorse a specific licensee to a prospective patient.¹

That condition is the design constraint this whole product is built around, so we state how we meet it:

• A flat fee, never per contact. Nobody pays us more for being contacted more, and no fee is tied to whether you become anyone's client.
• No recommendations. We do not tell you who to see. Results are lists computed from filters you choose. There is no "best match", no editors' pick, no "we recommend".
• No purchased position. Placement cannot be bought, and the ranking inputs are published in full.
• Disclosed on every page. "Paid for by participating therapists" appears in the footer of this site, not buried here.

6. Directory rules, when the directory opens

The directory is not open. There are no listings, and no one is paying us anything yet. When it opens, these rules bind us:

• Everyone is verified against the state register — the Board of Behavioral Sciences or the Board of Psychology — and re-checked nightly. A lapsed, suspended or revoked record takes the listing down that day.
• Availability is a hard gate. Two consecutive missed monthly confirmations hide a listing automatically.
• Fees are published, including the sliding-scale floor where one is offered.
• No testimonials or star ratings about individual therapists, ever. Soliciting testimonials from therapy clients is restricted by professional ethics and is trivially faked; we publish structured, checkable facts instead.
• We log the fact of a contact, never its content, never your name, and never anything you typed.

7. Advertising accuracy, and what members must show

California treats a professional listing as advertising, and prohibits false or misleading statements about licensed practice (Business & Professions Code §651). The Board of Behavioral Sciences requires that an advertisement carry the practitioner's name as filed with the Board, their licence number, and their licence title.²

Registered associates — AMFT, ACSW, APCC — must additionally show their registration number, their full registration title, the name of their employer or volunteer entity, and a statement that they are supervised by a licensed person.² Listings on this site will carry those fields as required fields, not optional ones, because a directory that lets an associate look like a licensee is doing the misleading on their behalf.

We do not publish a claim about a member that the member cannot document, and we do not describe our own members as licensed unless the state register says they are.

8. Editorial standards and corrections

Every consumer page carries numbered sources with the date each was checked. Where the law is unsettled or the evidence is thin, the page says so instead of picking a confident answer. Nothing is written to a keyword target.

No clinical review has taken place. The collective has no members yet, so no page claims to have been reviewed by a clinician, and an automated check fails our build if such a claim appears. When members join, guides will carry a named reviewer with their state registration or licence number and the review date.

Corrections. If something here is wrong, we want it corrected faster than you want it corrected. Point it out through the form on the institutions page. Substantive corrections are made in place and noted on the public work log, which records every deploy.

9. Privacy

No account is required to read anything, use any tool, or see any price. There is nothing to sign up for.

What we collect. Only what you type into one of the three notify forms: an email address, and the one or two fields that form asks for — a county, a licence type, an organisation name, a note. That is stored in our own database. We do not store your IP address, user agent, referrer, or any identifier that could link a signup to what you read here. Those addresses receive exactly one email, for the thing you asked to be told about.

Measurement. We use Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity to count pages and see where layouts break, configured without advertising signals or ad personalisation. They are not loaded at all if your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, and they are never loaded on /crisis or on the self-check tool — we accept not knowing whether those pages work rather than watch people use them.

What we never do. No advertising pixels. No data brokers. No selling or sharing of personal information, in the ordinary meaning of those words and in the meaning the CCPA gives them. No third-party form service, chat widget, or session-replay tool on any page that asks you a question.

Children. This site is written for a general audience and some guidance is written to be readable by teenagers. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.

10. Your privacy rights in California

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, you can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Because the only personal information we hold is a notify-list entry, "delete it" is a one-line request and we will not ask you why. Exercising any of these rights changes nothing else about how you can use this site — there is nothing to withhold from you.

We do not sell or share personal information, so there is no opt-out to offer you. We honour Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out preference signal regardless.

Requests go through the form on the institutions page; it reaches a person.

11. Confidentiality and mandated reporting

We are not your therapist, so we hold no clinical confidentiality obligation to you and nothing you send us is privileged. Do not send us clinical details about yourself or anyone else.

Therapists and registered associates in California are mandated reporters — of suspected child abuse or neglect, and of elder and dependent-adult abuse — and those duties follow them wherever they practise, including inside a therapy relationship that began through this directory. That is a feature of the profession, not of this site, and any therapist you contact can explain how it applies before you start.

If you are already someone's client, your records with them are governed by California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act and by the retention rules in the Business & Professions Code — seven years from your last session, or seven years past your 18th birthday. None of that is affected by anything you do here.

12. Copyright, and permission to republish

The guides, tools and artwork on this site are © TherapyCalifornia. You may republish any guide, with attribution and a link, at no cost — including on a county, school district, clinic or library site. That permission is deliberate: a resource that stays behind a permission wall does not reach anyone.

The permission does not extend to the wordmark, the logo, or the drawn landscape artwork, which identify us and are not licensed for reuse. Do not present our content as your own, alter figures or sources, or use it to imply that we endorse a person, product or practice.

13. Terms of use

By using this site you agree to use it lawfully and not to: scrape or copy it at volume in a way that degrades it for other people; misrepresent your licence status or identity in any form on it; submit anyone else's personal information; attempt to break, probe or overload it; or use anything here to harass, stalk or endanger a person.

We may remove a listing, refuse a membership, or decline a request from an organisation, at our discretion and without a fee to appeal. Where we do so over a factual dispute, we will say which fact.

Links to third-party sites — county programs, statutes, crisis lines, insurers — are provided because they are useful. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

14. Disclaimers and limits

This site is provided as is. We work hard on accuracy — every figure is sourced and dated, and the whole site is re-checked on a schedule — but we do not warrant that everything here is complete, current, or applicable to your situation. Law, plan design, prices and phone numbers change, sometimes without notice.

To the fullest extent permitted by California law, TherapyCalifornia and its members are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages arising from your use of this site or from your reliance on information here. Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for fraud, or for personal injury caused by our own negligence.

We are not responsible for the professional conduct of any independent therapist you find through this site. Each is separately licensed or registered, separately insured, and separately accountable to their board — and you can check any of them yourself: the state register is public and free to search.

15. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and both sides consent to that jurisdiction.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here. Both are standard and both would be to our advantage; a site whose argument is that you should be able to hold it to its word should not quietly remove the way you would do that.

Complaints about a licensed therapist or registered associate belong with the Board of Behavioral Sciences or the Board of Psychology, not with us — and you can complain to them whether or not you tell us. Complaints about a health plan's denial, delay or access failure belong with the Department of Managed Health Care Help Center, 888-466-2219, which also runs a free independent medical review.

16. Changes to this page

This is version 1.0, published 17 August 2026. When it changes materially we will publish what changed and when, on the work log, rather than silently editing in place. The promises we consider binding — and what we have said should happen if we break one — are on the pledge, which is versioned separately and keeps its old versions published.