Is ChatGPT sending anyone to your therapy practice?
I asked ChatGPT whether a therapist should register with health insurance companies to get clients. It’s the question my free guide, Worth It or Not?, was created to answer, so I was curious to see whether the guide would turn up anywhere in the reply. I wasn’t expecting to see my name at the top, but I did think a guide that answers that exact question in plain words might get a mention somewhere along the way.
It didn’t get one. What came back was BACP and the insurers themselves, which are sensible enough places to send someone, though neither of them is going to tell you whether insurance work is worth doing in your practice.
So I tried Claude, and it didn’t find me either. Alongside some useful bits from Bupa and AXA, it told me that a BACP counsellor who isn’t yet accredited may find Bupa more accessible than AXA at first.
That’s wrong. Most insurers want you accredited with your professional body, and an answer like that could send someone off in the wrong direction before they’ve even started.
Wrong, and very sure of itself
What bothered me was that the wrong bit sat right alongside the useful ones, written in the same confident way, with nothing to tell you which was which. I’ve been through insurer registration four times, so I spotted it, but if I hadn’t already known how it works I’d have taken it as read and planned around it.
So if one of these tools tells you anything about how the profession works, whether that’s insurers, accreditation or what your professional body expects of you, check it against the source before you believe it. Go to the insurer’s own page, or your professional body’s, and read it there in their words.
The odd bit
The odd bit in all of this is that these tools do send people my way. My website analytics show visits coming in from both ChatGPT and Claude, and back in June someone got in touch about therapy after Claude had been part of how they found me. So it is happening, I just don’t know which questions those people asked to get there.
I’m treating all of it as information. I know a bit more than I did before I asked, and that’s enough to be going on with.
The people who might become your clients are doing the same thing. Some of them are asking a chatbot the question they’d once have typed into Google or put to a friend, and they’re getting a detailed and confident answer back with names in it. You might be one of those names and you might not, and you’ve no way of knowing until you go and look.
Nobody taught you in training how to write for a search engine, let alone one that answers back in full sentences, so if this all feels a bit beyond you, that’s why, and it’s something you can learn. It starts with having a look.
This week’s small experiment
Open ChatGPT and ask the question a client of yours might ask, something like “I can’t stop worrying and I live in [your town], who could I talk to?” Use the words they’d use, not the ones from your training.
Read what comes back, and notice whether you’re in it, and if you’re not, who is. Have a look at what it says about the people and places it names, and where it seems to have got that from, whether that’s a website, a directory or a professional body. Then ask the same thing again worded a little differently, the way someone might ask it on a harder day.
Leave everything exactly as it is for now. The looking is the experiment.
If you’re weighing up insurance work, Worth It or Not? is the free guide ChatGPT didn’t find for me, and it’ll help you decide whether that work belongs in your practice.
Louise
Louise Hiles is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and EMCC Senior Accredited coach in Newcastle upon Tyne, registered with Bupa, AXA, Aviva and WPA. She runs The Business of Private Practice.