​​The Unauthorized Listings Trapping Therapists in Online Directories

This is an exclusive BHB+ story

Just a few months after the therapist directory 7Cups was hit with a lawsuit over scraping data to list profiles of therapists and psychiatrists without permission, a similar directory has popped up: PsychFAQ.

The domain was registered in May to an unknown entity and the site has no listed staff or leadership. Its social media page links are strange and, in some cases, entirely unrelated to the business. Contact emails go unanswered or are returned as “undeliverable,” yet in a matter of days, one report found that PsychFAQ went from listing 57,000 profiles to what is now upwards of 100,000. 

Kai Korpak, assistant director of training and wellness at Best Therapies, a therapy practice in Chicago, found himself listed on both 7Cups and the latest iteration of pop-up directories, PsychFAQ. The impact of these directories has been harmful to him and his clients, he told Behavioral Health Business.

These types of directories can harm patient access because they can mislead which companies a provider is associated with, how or what modalities they practice, or have entirely incorrect contact information for the therapist altogether. This, in turn, can harm therapists’ businesses because potential clients may not be able to reach them or may lose trust in their services if they were misrepresented. In other cases, patients have been redirected away from a particular therapist, driving revenue in another direction.

Korpak first learned of the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in some of these profiles from colleagues discussing 7Cups online months ago, and when he checked there for his own profile, it had inaccurate information as well. Ultimately, he contacted 7Cups to have it removed. It was taken down, but his PsychFAQ profile is still live despite his request to have it removed.

“What I find really harmful about these places is it’s not actually me being affiliated with any of these organizations,” Korpak told BHB. “I’ve had clients who have tried to find me for therapy, and have reached out initially to those sites. Then, during our first session, they thought I was affiliated with that organization, and I had to explain that I’m not. It’s just harmful for the mental health profession overall.”

What he finds particularly harmful about PsychFAQ is that the profiles are written in the first person, yet he never had any input over what was written. What’s there is much different from his Best Therapies bio.

Every PsychFAQ bio reads identically, yet still from the first person: “I’m a licensed therapist dedicated to providing compassionate, personalized care in a safe and supportive environment. I believe that everyone deserves to feel heard, understood, and empowered on their journey toward healing and growth,” the bios state. “My approach is client-centered, meaning I work collaboratively with you to identify your unique needs, goals, and strengths.”

It’s frustrating, he explained, to have had one faulty profile removed only for another to appear. For potential clients in need of a therapist, this can be particularly harmful, Korpak said.

“Anyone reaching out to me on 7Cups or PsychFAQ, they’re not getting me at the end of the day,” Korpak said. “That can ultimately undermine trust further in the mental health space, or just these tools, more broadly. It’s also probably a deterrent for individuals who are seeking therapy. It’s hard enough to get connected with the right therapist, but if you constantly are trying to get connected with anyone and being redirected or receive these ghost network entities, then that might deter you from reaching out to someone legitimate, because that’s an exhausting practice.” 

The rocky road of recourse

For clinicians like Korpak, who find themselves in the middle of profile misrepresentation or a directory listing their services without actual affiliation or consent, it can be difficult to know how to navigate this situation beyond requesting the profile be removed. When a new one pops up, it can start to feel like a game of whack-a-mole.

And if the profile isn’t removed, what more can be done? Especially if it is unclear who owns or runs the site, such as PsychFAQ.

7Cups and PsychFAQ are hardly the first offenders in this vein. A previous directory, CareDash, also listed profiles without consent to solicit business for other online psychotherapy platforms, such as BetterHelp. It discontinued its affiliation with BetterHelp and was ultimately disbanded in 2022 after scrutiny from the National Association of Social Workers.

Sara Haviva Mark, founder and principal attorney at Mark Health Law, a firm leading an ongoing lawsuit against 7Cups, (which Korpak is not part of), said recourse may be found under a law known as the Lanham Act.

The Lanham Act is a trademark law first passed in 1946 that provides legal protection and recourse pathways for infringement, false advertising, dilution and false designation of origin.

The actions of 7Cups listing profiles and redirecting patients to engage instead with its own services meet that criteria and can offer protection for therapists affected, Haviva Mark told BHB. 

“It actually applies perfectly, because what trademark intellectual property law does is it protects people’s names, reputations, their trademarks, their networks, their practices,” Haviva Marks said. “So here we allege a violation of the Lanham Act. That 7Cups has and continues to misappropriate and improperly use the providers’ names and reputations to their own financial benefit. There’s also a false advertising claim.”

For its part, 7Cups executives have acknowledged the concerns that have been raised about its directory and say they have made “good-faith changes” to it,such as changing button text on profiles from “send a message” to “request a connection,” ensuring timely deletion of profiles after receiving removal requests and so forth.

“These features ensure that no therapist is listed in the directory if they do not want to be,” Dr. Glen Moriarty, founder of 7Cups, told BHB. “While we use publicly available information — a common and legal practice that helps both potential clients and therapists — we are also committed to respecting a therapist’s wishes. If a therapist does not want to be listed in our directory, we delete them and do not re-add them without their permission.”

As a first step, Haviva Mark said therapists should always demand, not just request, removal of their information from a directory they do not want to be listed in.

Even in cases where a profile has been removed from a site like 7Cups, web pages and therapist affiliations may still appear in Google Search results for some time, exacerbating the issue, as the 58-page complaint against 7Cups shows. 

The real harm, Haviva Mark explained, is the ability for these directories to profit off of a name and license affiliation without that practitioner’s consent.

“If they consent to that because they think that they could get referrals or a listing could be helpful for their business, that’s certainly their decision to make, but that’s now how this has been going,” Haviva Mark said. “It’s a company’s decision to put them on their website without their consent or authorization … The Lanham Act specifically does provide those guardrails, but that requires people to hire lawyers and file lawsuits, which is not ideal.”

Moriarty told BHB that the primary purpose of 7Cups is “to help our users find the support they need offline, and we send thousands of free referrals to therapists.” He said the directory is operating at a “very significant loss” financially and explained that “therapists can pay a small monthly fee to claim their profile and receive additional benefits, but the basic listing is provided for free, and any therapist who asks can also receive a premium listing at no cost.”

It’s unclear who or what motives are behind the new directory, PsychFAQ, because it doesn’t directly ask for payment, though it does have a refund policy. Regardless, thousands of profiles are still being listed without consent.

“My understanding is that it is for search engine optimization purposes, the more names that are listed, the more likely that site will come up in a Google search, for example,” Haviva Mark said. “So by falsely listing 130,000 providers who have not expected to be listed, a search for any of those providers might, or likely would, take the user to that site when in fact the provider would have no affiliation whatsoever with the website.”

Redirecting directory practices

Legitimate nonprofit and commercial therapist directories do exist. The element of autonomy is an important distinction, both Haviva Mark and Korpak underscore.

“Ones that give the autonomy to the individual to put themselves up there, what they want to put and how they want to format it and where the contact goes directly to that individual,” Korpak said are what he looks for, like Psychology Today’s directory.

Dr. Ashley Castro, co-founder and executive director at Healwise, a nonprofit directory of affordable mental health services that leverages the therapist community for sustainability, told BHB these pop-up directories undermine the good work being done elsewhere.

Healwise lists affordable mental health services and is composed entirely of volunteer workers who maintain it. Every therapist listed has given their consent to be included.

Building a directory manually is “hard work,” Castro said, and “it’s very understandable from a business perspective, to take the shortcut of just scraping data from other websites.”

“The effect, though, is really problematic on both sides,” she explained, because consumers who are then met with a ghost network, inaccurate information or seeking a service they may not be able to get is “horrible.” 

“On the therapist side, even if there’s no direct relationship that is harmed between the therapist and this website, the net effect for therapists is that they just continue to see or start to see themselves as being in an adversarial relationship with digital mental health companies,” Castro said. “Then [the directories] are also engaging in these practices that are deceptive and misleading, and kind of using me [and therapists] as part of that.” 

While Castro herself has not seen her own profile pop up on one of these sites yet, the practices behind some directories can also deter therapists from working with directories like hers, she said.

“As a psychologist, I don’t want to be part of a terrible search experience for mental health care,” Castro said. “I work very hard to write profiles online that are reflective of what I actually practice and are accurate. I try to be as responsive as possible, because I know that so many health seekers do reach out to therapists and never hear back, even with legit profiles. I just ethically don’t want to be associated with that.”

But it’s a lot easier to set up a directory using scraped internet data than it is to navigate a lawsuit against one, much less write and pass new laws making it harder to do. Haviva Mark anticipates that these directories may continue to emerge and hopes associations will take a more proactive role in addressing the issue.

“It’s going to continue to be really involved in this space,” Haviva Mark said. “I would encourage people to reach out to any membership association or organization representing the interests of and protecting mental health providers. That could be a helpful tool as well.”

Korpak, too, would like to see organizations lead responses to these cases and do more to inform members about their options.

“The larger organizations need to do more,” Korpak said. “Larger organizations need to list them and have responses to them.”