Self-Yelp

By Gia DiNicola, Spring 2010

Yelp has entered into the elite status of corporations that have names that can function as both a noun and a verb. Google is another example, as in, “That guy I met the other night? Yeah, I totally ‘googled’ him.”

But regardless of the grammatical implications, I yelp everything. From the place I get my hair cut to the place I get my pedicure I reference Yelp. In fact, I may rely on Yelp’s recommendations a little too much.

Case in point: I decided to check out Yelp reviews for the therapist I have been seeing for almost two years. What I found shocked me. She is listed, but has no reviews. Even the homeless guy who sells the Street Sheet at the 18th Street BART station has a Yelp review under the category “local flavor.” I felt my therapist’s lack of reviews deserved further exploration.

Maybe she doesn’t see a clientele that yelps, I thought to myself. But I frequently see young women and men filing in and out of her office—the target Yelp demographic. To make sure this wasn’t a fluke, I started yelping other therapists in the area.

As I perused the reviews of therapists, I saw mostly positive reviews, but that’s not to say that several less than positive reviews were also in the mix. I quickly noticed how much personal information people included in their reviews. In my opinion, too much information was disclosed. For example, one reviewer wrote about the way his therapist helped him through a nasty divorce. Another person wrote about how her therapist helped her when she was contemplating suicide.

The implications of yelping a therapist are great. Part of the therapeutic process, ideally, is the creation of a private space where the client can trust the therapist with personal details, feel a sense of value, be heard, and ultimately become better psychologically adapted. It is a space that is created by the client and the therapist, and each one is unique. Publishing online reviews of therapists has the potential to pollute that therapeutic space and the therapeutic relationship.

The first pitfall of the reviewing therapists online is that confidentiality goes out the window. Airing one’s dirty laundry on websites like Twitter and Facebook is bad enough, but doing so on a site with contents that are open to the public is a whole different level of self-disclosure. Secondly, the knowledge that they may be evaluated may put an enormous amount of pressure on the therapist to “succeed” with a client out of fear that a negative review may hurt their practice. Becoming chummy with a client for the sake of a Yelp review may come at the expense of giving a client what is clinically relevant.

Some businesses owners have been known to create fake Yelp profiles in order to write positive reviews and boost the rating of their real establishment. Although psychologists are bound by the ethics code not to advertise therapeutic results, who is to stop a therapist from creating a profile and providing a positive, but misleading Yelp review?

Finally, when a reviewer reports a bad experience at an establishment, the owner of the business can respond to the review in justify or deny the customer’s negative experience. Thus, a therapist may feel pulled to respond to a poor review (“She didn’t like me because she doesn’t like anyone! She has a disorganized attachment that was fostered by her mother’s variable presence in her life as a child. I was her therapist, so I would know!”). However, this is clearly a violation of the ethics code.

Reviewing one’s therapist the way one would review a coffee shop seems to cheapen the therapeutic relationship. Furthermore, Yelp reviews of therapists hold the potential to harm both clients and therapists. So while I won’t be reviewing my therapist, I will use Yelp to find the next great place for dinner. I hear this Mediterranean place down the street has great falafel…and they have a 4.5 star average rating with 1,167 reviews!