Directory and monthly availability contracts staged
Rails data, applications, availability, search and shortlist rules are release-gated. No public profiles or member email yet.
Every release, kept in view.
This is the complete record behind the shorter list on the current status page. It includes corrections and unglamorous infrastructure because those changes count too.
2026 (74)
Stale roadmap closed and print-kit discovery strengthened
The public roadmap now reflects work that was already complete: the 7 Cups, prescribing-platform and employer-platform comparisons; the full primary-source re-verification sweep; and the planned static content inventory. The 10-Day Right, license decoder and cost answer now lead naturally to their matching print resources. A separate earned-link plan identifies schools, campuses, counties and libraries that already maintain the kind of resource collection the kit serves; no outreach was sent.
Therapist Support relationship made public
The therapist-facing collective page and the site footer now link plainly to therapistsupport.org as the separate California practice, licensure and money resource. The placement is descriptive and relevant rather than a sitewide keyword-link exchange.
Free California mental-health print kit shipped
Three production PDFs are now available without a form at /kits: ten cut-out 10-Day Right wallet cards per sheet, an 11×17 affordability-routes poster, and a California license decoder. The appointment card includes the qualified-provider exception and DMHC number; the license guide points to the state lookup. The release suite now fails if any PDF is missing or malformed.
Private answer-search foundation built and release-gated
A build-generated index now covers all 288 indexable content pages without including gated city pages. Ranking understands common California insurance, cost, teen, work, privacy and license language; crisis phrases are detected locally; and no query text is sent to analytics or stored. A fourteenth release gate checks index completeness, duplicate URLs, representative intent results and crisis false positives. The experimental visual concepts are noindex, and the public homepage keeps its established interface until a replacement is approved.
All 58 county artwork systems live
Every county now has a coherent six-format vector set: responsive desktop, tablet and mobile heroes, plus poster, square and mark — 348 production SVGs. All county pages use their own artwork, the county index carries all 58 marks, and automated checks verify file completeness, safe SVG structure and the correct crop at phone, tablet and desktop widths.
Five answers on the parts of the system people are inside, not choosing
What happens after the 72-hour hold — the certification hearing is within four days, held on the ward, run by someone who is barred from working for the facility, and an advocate is required to come and find you. Whether they can medicate you over your objection: refusing triggers a hearing, not an override. How the tribal and urban Indian health system works in a state with no IHS hospital. And who decides about psychiatric medication for a child in foster care, which is a judge, on a form the child and the caregiver can both answer.
Five things we had wrong about involuntary holds and firearms
Our 5150 page said the facility must release you early if “the professional in charge” decides so. The statute says the opposite — release before 72 hours is permitted only if the psychiatrist directly responsible believes it, on their own observations. The same page missed a right created in 2023: if you are still held and have not been certified, you get a hearing within seven days of being detained. Both that page and the conservatorship page listed who can write a 5150 incompletely, leaving out mobile crisis teams. And the firearms page omitted the conservatorship prohibition entirely while telling readers there were only two ways to petition back, when there are three.
Our own research prompts were wrong twice, and the researchers said so
We asked for the three-factor capacity standard “in section 5334.” There is no capacity standard anywhere in that article — no elements, no burden, no standard of proof. The test practitioners use comes from case law, and anyone quoting it to the code is mistaken. We also asked for an emergency exception in the foster-care medication statute; the word “emergency” appears zero times there. It is a Rule of Court, which the Judicial Council can change without the Legislature. Both corrections are on the pages.
/insurance is a guide now, not a list
Seventy pages in one alphabetical grid meant the seven carrier walkthroughs people actually arrive looking for were buried under fifty-eight counties. The index is grouped: start with what you have, then your carrier by name, then what to do when nobody is in network, then every county as a scannable list rather than fifty-eight identical cards. The grouping is configuration, so any section can use it when it outgrows a flat grid.
Nine answers: criminal diversion, Medicare, IHSS
California rewrote mental health diversion in 2022 and the rewrite runs in the defendant's favour — the court must find the disorder was a significant factor unless there is clear and convincing evidence otherwise. Medicare has covered marriage and family therapists since January 2024, which matters here more than anywhere because LMFT is California's largest licence. And the IHSS protective supervision test stopped being written around being “mentally impaired” in July 2024; it is now about whether someone can assess danger.
Three things we had wrong, found by attacking our own pages
The caregivers page cited Welfare and Institutions Code section 4362 for the Caregiver Resource Centers. That section is repealed and returns nothing; the centres live in sections 9156 to 9159 and are run by the Department of Aging. The same page claimed there are eleven of them, which no state page says, so the number is gone. And the Medicare page said Congress had moved the telehealth in-person date four times. Five.
A citation that was right about the fact and wrong about the law
Research came back supporting “marriage and family therapists are paid at 75% of the psychologist rate” with a regulation that actually says psychologists are paid at 100% and never mentions them. The fact was true; the citation was checkable and wrong. Reading the real statute also settled a question we had flagged as guesswork — the 80/20 split applies to the reduced figure, so a patient's share is genuinely lower with an LMFT than with a psychologist.
Every wrong address on this site returned the homepage, with a 200
There was no 404 page, so Cloudflare fell back to serving the front page for any path that matched nothing — and returned it as a success. A mistyped URL, a dead inbound link and a page we had moved all looked to a search engine like a real page with the homepage's content on it. There is a 404 page now, it returns the right status code, and it leads with 988 rather than with an apology.
Decided: membership is $50 a month, and the question is off the list
No annual plan, no tiers, no founding rate that expires into something worse. Month to month, so leaving is easy — which is the only version of this that keeps us honest. The decision had already been made and was still sitting on this page as an open question; a list that only grows is one nobody reads.
The page headers were showing about a third of the artwork
Every drawn California view on the site was being rendered as one flat SVG scaled to a shallow strip, which crops a 3.7:1 composition into a 7:1 window — so roughly half of each drawing, including every sky band, was thrown away, and what survived read as a slab of colour. The bands are built to a two-layer rule: ridge and water paths stretch full width, the landmark keeps its aspect ratio and stands in the right 45%. The header component now splits each file on that structure and renders the layers independently, at the ratio the artwork was drawn to. Yosemite, the Sunset houses, the orange groves and the Inyo spires are all visible for the first time.
A Medi-Cal route page for all 58 counties, not five
Each one names the managed care plans that actually operate in that county — read county by county off the state's own plan directory, not a summary — the county's own line with the date we read it, and the script for both doors. Kaiser's Medi-Cal contract covers 32 of 58 counties and is restricted-enrolment everywhere; California Health & Wellness no longer exists; Alameda, Contra Costa, Imperial and Ventura are no longer two-plan counties. Glenn County still gets no printed number, because there is still no official page we can read one off.
A specimen listing on /find and /for-therapists
You cannot search a directory that has nobody in it, so instead the page now shows exactly what a listing will carry: the fee in full, the date availability was last confirmed, what insurance is taken, the reply time. It is framed and captioned as a specimen on the artwork itself, every name plate reads “your name here”, and no result count appears anywhere — there is nothing to count yet.
We were citing the wrong bill for four days
Our records page said SB 815 removed the clerical-search charge for medical records, effective January 2024. It was AB 2520, effective January 2021 — SB 815 changed one cross-reference and its own Legislative Counsel's Digest calls it technical and nonsubstantive. An adversarial check found it. Corrected on the page and in the verification register, and written up here because a correction nobody publishes is not a correction.
Twelve answers: leave after a loss, the vanished therapist, regional centers
Reproductive loss leave asks you for no documentation at all, and its three-month clock restarts after pregnancy leave ends. Bereavement leave is five days per death, not five days a year. And the section every guide cites when a therapist dies or closes — Health and Safety Code 123145 — covers clinics and hospitals, not private practices, so what happens to your file is genuinely unsettled in California law. We say so rather than filling the gap with confidence.
Zero unverified claims
The site's internal re-check queue is empty for the first time. Campus counselling pages now carry what each campus actually publishes — including that UCLA charges students without UC SHIP $30 a session and caps them at four, that two campuses explicitly disclaim session limits, and that a widely repeated eight-session cap at San José State is not on that campus's site at all.
Three guides on rights people are told wrongly
A work-caused mental health claim, start to finish, with the treatment clocks and the appeal that is the only appeal. What an emotional support animal letter still does in California after the federal position reversed twice. And what can actually be pulled out of your therapy in a custody case — plus a rewritten page on what to do the day a subpoena arrives, which is a five-day and ten-day problem, not a lawyer-or-nothing problem.
Teen pages corrected and one page added
Four live pages on minor consent were citing an aggregator rather than the statute, and two of them stated law that had been repealed. Rewritten against the operative text, with the parent-liability rule, the psychotropic-medication limit, the records rule that is automatic rather than discretionary, and the automatic explanation-of-benefits protection. New: what a 14-to-17-year-old can do when a parent has admitted them to a private psychiatric facility. One of today's own new claims was then killed by an adversarial re-check before it shipped: the explanation-of-benefits protection changes whose name is on the envelope, not which address it goes to, so the page now leads with the phone call that actually moves the mail.
The decisions themselves, at the top of this page
The things only the owner can settle were spread down the page as “Needs owner” badges, which described a decision without ever putting it to anyone. They are now the first block on /status, each written as the actual choices — founding-member terms, engaging counsel, whether the minor-consent pages ship and in what form, when cohort recruiting starts, what a listing shows, what a named reviewer commits to, and rotating the deploy token — with what each option costs and where we lean. Answering one in a sentence moves the work behind it the same day.
Leaving jail or prison · therapy in your language · reporting a therapist
The reentry page corrects the belief that costs people their coverage: since January 2023 Medi-Cal is suspended, not terminated, and the suspension ends the day you are released. The language page exists because of one sentence in a California regulation — a free qualified interpreter must be offered even when a family member who could interpret is present, and the offer and any refusal go in the record. Nobody should be interpreting their own therapy through their child, and a minor may interpret only in an emergency. The complaint page is written carefully: most therapists never come near any of this, but a licence is a public trust, and deciding whether something crossed a line should not be left to the person it happened to.
The Behavioral Health Services Act, explained in full
A long-form explainer on the biggest change to California county mental health funding in twenty years, which took effect on 1 July 2026 and which almost nobody has explained to the people who use the services. It covers the 30/35/35 split and the sub-rules inside it, the first-ever standalone funding for substance use treatment, the fact that Medi-Cal enrolment is not required, the priority populations now written into statute, and the honest version of the prevention change — the county set-aside dropped from 20% to an early-intervention floor of about 17.85%, the 5% innovation share is gone, and population-level prevention moved to a state agency. It also states what the law does not do: it creates no involuntary treatment authority, and the two measures people confuse it with were never on a ballot. Plus the public-comment rights that are the only real lever a resident has over the next plan.
What Medi-Cal owes kids · crisis help without police · conversion therapy, precisely
The children's page is the biggest unused right in California mental health and it turns on one phrase — 'correct or ameliorate' — which federal guidance says does not require a cure and covers services that merely keep a child from getting worse. Parents are routinely told the opposite of all three key facts. The crisis page was written carefully because getting it wrong could put someone in danger: it says what 988 does and does not know about your location, that fewer than two per cent of its calls involve emergency services but that a minority of those happen without consent, and that calling a mobile crisis team makes a police-led encounter less likely without making a hold impossible. On conversion therapy, the common sentence 'it is illegal in California' is wrong in three ways at once, and the insurance story is a nondiscrimination rule rather than the coverage mandate people describe.
Veterans · workplace accommodation · what changed at your county in July
The county page matters most: the rules behind every one of our 58 county pages changed on 1 July 2026 and almost nobody has explained it to the people who use those services. Thirty per cent of county behavioral health money now goes to housing, substance use disorder is funded on its own for the first time, you do not need Medi-Cal, and the prevention set-aside moved to the state. The veterans guide exists because three false beliefs — you need a rating, you need to be enrolled, a bad discharge disqualifies you — keep people out of care that is already theirs. And the workplace guide answers the question people actually ask, which is whether they have to tell their employer what is wrong with them. They do not, and the regulation says so in one sentence.
Lighthouse pass — fonts, heading order, cache headers
The first full Lighthouse pass, eight pages covering every template, and it found three real defects. The self-hosted font stylesheet was render-blocking on all 313 pages, costing a round trip before anything appeared; it is now inlined at build time with the fold-critical files preloaded, which took first contentful paint from about 2.4 seconds to about 1.35 in the harness and cumulative layout shift to zero everywhere. Heading order was invalid site-wide — footer and sidebar labels were h5 and h4 under an h1 — so accessibility scored 98; it now scores 100 on every page measured. And nothing was setting cache headers, so fonts and hashed assets now get a year. Scores: performance 92-99, accessibility 100, best practices 96-100, SEO 100. The harness is checked in at site/scripts/lighthouse.mjs so the next person can repeat it.
Medicare 2026 corrections · self-funded employer plans · CARE Court and conservatorship
The Medicare telehealth position changed in February 2026 and almost every page on the internet about it is stale, including ours: the in-person visit requirement is now 2028, not 2025 or 2026. We also had never told anyone that Medicare pays marriage and family therapists and counselors 75% of what it pays a psychologist, or that a California associate cannot bill it. The self-funded page exists because we created the gap: we kept telling people California's rules don't apply to them without saying what does. And the families page says the thing families are never told plainly — CARE Court cannot force medication and carries no contempt penalty for refusing it, a conservatorship cannot be petitioned for by a family at all, and the one sentence that decides many conservatorship cases requires a relative to put their willingness in writing.
42 CFR Part 2 — addiction treatment records
Written for the person who will not walk into a programme because they think the intake form ends up in a courtroom. It does not: the federal statute forecloses use of these records against a patient in any proceeding, the restriction follows the record to whoever holds it, and an order to prosecute the patient requires a crime of the homicide or kidnapping class rather than an ordinary drug offence. The page draws the line most guidance blurs — the rule covers programmes that hold themselves out as treating substance use, not every clinician who writes down what you told them.
504 plans and IEPs for anxiety and depression · levels of care · postpartum screening
Written because families get steered toward the door with no lock on it. Section 504 has the broader eligibility test and no deadline attached; the IEP route is harder to qualify for and is the one with enforceable clocks and a hearing at the end. Both are laid out with the regulation cited line by line, including the sentence that says a referral has to be in writing — the single reason most families' clocks never start. The levels-of-care page gives people with a residential or intensive-outpatient denial the two statutes that matter: the one naming those levels as covered, and the one that says a plan may not substitute its own utilisation criteria for the specialty association's.
Timely-access guide rewritten · security clearances · unpaid therapy bills
The 10-day rule page is the most-used thing on this site, and it was under-claiming. The follow-up right created in 2022 has a second sentence saying it is a maximum wait and not a session cap — a plan that tells you otherwise has read it backwards. It also has a limit we were not stating: it does not cover psychiatrists. On clearances, the widely repeated advice is built on a form that was replaced in 2016: the current questionnaire does not ask whether you have had counseling at all, and the adjudicative guidelines list stopping treatment as disqualifying and staying in it as mitigating. On money, California made medical debt unreportable in January 2025 and made a knowing violation void the debt — with the honest caveat that a federal agency now claims that law is preempted, no court has decided it, and the state's Attorney General says it stands.
Immigration-status corrections · the IMR appeal · free screening · advance directives
The correction matters more than the new pages. Six live sentences said or implied that Medi-Cal covers California adults regardless of immigration status and that enrolment data does not reach immigration enforcement. Both were true when they were written and neither is true now — the adult enrolment freeze took effect 1 January 2026, and a December 2025 federal ruling permits limited data sharing. A site that reassures someone into a decision on stale law is doing harm, so the sentences are rewritten and the new page carries a date stamp and a scheduled re-check for 18 September 2026, when the public-charge protection ends. The IMR guide publishes a number we computed from the state's own determinations file: for 2023–2025, mental-health denials taken to Independent Medical Review were overturned about 77% of the time. The appeal is free and binding on the plan, and almost nobody uses it.
Four answers: your records, the EOB, the 5150 hold, therapy and firearms
Two of these exist because the fear itself keeps people out of a therapist's office. The firearms page says plainly that outpatient therapy, a diagnosis and prescribed medication are not prohibitions in California, and names the four events that are, with the Welfare & Institutions Code sections and the note that §8103's current text only took effect 1 September 2025. The 5150 page refuses to define "danger to self or others" because the LPS Act does not define it. On records, we caught a fee rule that most published California guidance still gets wrong. Also fixed a line that said statute-flagged pages were "not yet published" while they were live — it now says what it means: cite-checked by us, not yet read by counsel.
Testing & evaluations vertical
Six pages plus a school-assessment worksheet. Built on the Medi-Cal testing caps, the Medicare per-hour benchmark, the Education Code's 15- and 60-day assessment deadlines, the January 2026 no-rediagnosis rule for autism coverage, and our own count from the state's independent-review dataset: about a third of testing denials get overturned on appeal.
All 58 counties + 41 city and campus pages
289 pages live, up from 187. Every county's behavioral health line verified against that county's own site and dated — 57 of 58, with the one gap stated rather than filled with a plausible number. /counties publishes the whole table for anyone to republish.
The free layer: state youth platforms, school-based care, Medi-Cal income
Three verified answers on help that exists and costs nothing, plus the Medi-Cal income threshold — a figure the handoff had flagged do-not-ship-unverified, now sourced to the state's own eligibility chart and added to the Medi-Cal route page.
Policies page · crisis bar to the footer · /status numbers
New /policies covering the §650(h) referral carve-out, the BBS advertising fields a listing must show, privacy and CCPA rights, and the terms — with an honest banner that counsel has not reviewed it. The crisis bar moved off the top of every page into a footer band. /status now opens with computed statistics. Self-descriptions no longer say "licensed".
Five statute-backed answers + verification round 4
Private use of a parent's insurance · record retention · out-of-state therapists and PSYPACT · whether coverage needs a diagnosis · texting between sessions. Every figure read at the primary source; all five statutes added to the public source register with check dates.
Golden Gate hero + drawn headers everywhere
The homepage and /find open on a two-layer Golden Gate band; every section and standalone page now carries its assigned California view with the headline set inside it. New /find headline: “Life is complicated. Finding a therapist in California shouldn't be.” The contrast gate now measures nine more pages, because copy over artwork is where colour goes wrong.
Membership price settled at $50/month
One flat price, month to month, no annual plan and no tiers — /for-therapists updated to say so. The build spec's $540/year and associate tier are superseded.
Pre-launch honesty pass + notify lists
/find, /for-therapists, /for-institutions and /about now state plainly what does not exist yet, each with a form to be told when it does — self-hosted, minimum fields, nothing sold or shared. Separately, 76 pages were leaking unfilled data tokens and internal review notes into public HTML; the renderer now drops them and an eleventh quality gate enforces it.
Design-handoff alignment + crisis-page rebuild
Production logo asset inlined as the header mark · /crisis rebuilt to §11.5 with no nav, no footer links and no analytics · /learn regrouped by decision · /tools rebuilt question-first · label token standardised on #5F5A4C · landscape bands now close on their dark band. Two live crisis-line errors corrected: 988's press-3 option (retired July 2025) and the Warm Line's number and hours.
Header cleanup — promise bar removed
The three promises came out of the header and live in the footer legal strip. Three checks above the fold on every page read as a badge rail, and the strip was spending part of the mobile fold budget that belongs to the page.
Production artwork shipped
The 31 hand-drawn production SVGs from the design package — four logo variants, eleven county hero bands, sixteen posters — are in the site at /assets and ship as drawn. The header mark is the real file, not a redraw.
Answers batch + city set complete
5 new answers incl. the does-therapy-work evidence page and the CA Warm Line · final 5 city blocks — the 32-city set now covers every major California market with verified county lines.
Fact verification round 2
All 10 major county access lines confirmed against official county sources; verified notes now inline on 13 city/campus blocks and in the public source register. 19 figures verified across both rounds — zero errors found.
Fact verification round 1
Nine core figures checked against primary sources (EDD, CMS, DMHC, county pages): all confirmed accurate, incl. the SDI $1,765 max and the new 2026 Medicare deductible ($283) now cited on the Medicare page. Verified-flags recorded in the public source register.
Prescribing platforms + answers batch
Online-psychiatry comparison with the four-question test · 5 new answers · 5 new city blocks · JSON-LD dateModified now updates with every deploy instead of a hardcoded date.
Mobile fix + responsive QA gate
Compact mobile header with scrollable nav, one-line crisis bar, tight promise bar, scrollable tables, wrapping long links. Gate 10 now renders 9 template pages × 3 viewports on every deploy — 27 renders, 0 failures.
Cluster 6 complete + campus set
Employer mental-health platforms decoded (Lyra/Spring/Modern) · tech-burnout · entertainment industry (ECF, Behind the Scenes, union plans) · 9 campus blocks staged. Library at 165 live pages + 31 staged blocks.
Provider + public-program pages
Psychologists guide (PsyD/PhD, when the doctorate matters), Medicare route (incl. the 2024 MFT/MHC billing change), helping-a-parent scripts, and 5 new quick answers. Library at 160 pages.
SEO + accessibility pass
Per-section OG images (10 + default) · BreadcrumbList structured data + visible breadcrumb trails on all article and section pages · skip-to-content link · site-wide visible keyboard focus states. Plus 5 new life-situation pages (divorce, caregivers, job loss, new-to-California, first-gen).
Comparisons +3, topics +3
Psychology Today alternatives, online vs in-person, 7 Cups review · chronic pain, anger, addiction (levels of care). Library at 149 pages live.
City blocks batch 3
Fremont, Glendale, Huntington Beach, Oxnard, Fontana — county access lines, language-access angles, local fee bands. Content repo, staged for directory city pages.
Printable worksheets (§7.2)
New /worksheets section: SDI claim, denial appeal, records request, DMHC complaint. New worksheet template with step cards, print checkboxes, script boxes, and print styles. Cross-linked from the rights guides.
Public quality gates
The QA harness (9 automated checks: banned words, 988 coverage, sources, claim leaks, links, schema, metadata, page weight, WCAG contrast) now publishes its real results on this page with every deploy
Teens set + medication map
A teen-facing rights page with quick-exit, the parents' guide to refusal, and the who-prescribes map
Conditions cluster
Six condition-as-decision pages: OCD, adult ADHD, panic, insomnia, eating disorders, bipolar — each ends in a route, never a lecture
Google indexing live
Sitemap submitted in Search Console; coverage monitoring continues
Modality set + AI comparisons
10 types-of-therapy pages and the two 2026 comparison pages, from the content-universe priority list
Comprehensive public roadmap
This page now shows every workstream, item, and blocker — not just highlights
Review claims removed sitewide
Bylines, promise bar, pledge, and homepage now claim only what's true today
Homepage hero restored
Sage-meadow landscape with carved headline and working phrase router, per the 9a mockup
Fonts self-hosted + FAQ schema
Latin-subset woff2s; FAQPage structured data on 100+ pages
9 more content pages
Six city blocks + license verification, psychiatric NPs, group therapy costs
Topic pages
Anxiety, depression, burnout, trauma, after-the-fire
Measurement added, honestly
Analytics with hard privacy limits; pledge updated to disclose in full
Site live at therapycalifornia.org
Cloudflare Pages, custom domain + www, full design system, 106 pages at launch
Accessibility + link audit
WCAG AA contrast fixes; zero broken internal links across the build
2-minute check-in tool
PHQ-9 + GAD-7, scored entirely in the browser, nothing stored, analytics excluded
Waves 1–5 content (101 pages)
Insurance routes, rights, costs, deciding guides, quick answers, comparisons, starting points
Citation verification
SB 221, H&S §1367.03, §124260/AB 665, B&P §650(h), 2026 SDI rates, county access lines — logged in the source register