I spent a morning reading therapist profiles. Here's what I noticed.

I’ve been looking closely at therapist profiles recently, partly because I offered to give a few therapists five honest observations on theirs.

That led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

I started looking at more.

Some were short. Some were incredibly detailed. Some focused heavily on qualifications and modalities. Others said much more about the person behind them.

There wasn’t one approach that was obviously right.

But I did notice something.

Most therapists have enough to say.

The problem usually wasn’t a lack of information.

There was plenty of it.

Qualifications, approaches, areas of counselling, previous experience, explanations of how therapy works, fees, availability.

What varied enormously was how quickly I could answer a much simpler question:

That seems important.

Someone looking for a therapist probably isn’t approaching the page with the attention I was giving it. They might be anxious, grieving, struggling with a relationship or simply exhausted.

They may also have several other profiles open.

They’re trying to make a very human decision from pages that, structurally, can look quite similar.

More detail didn’t necessarily make someone clearer.

One of the shorter profiles I looked at made it immediately obvious what the therapist particularly worked with.

Some much longer profiles contained far more evidence of experience, but I had to work harder to understand what I should remember about the person.

That surprised me a little.

The question probably isn’t:

How much should I write?

It’s:

What do I want someone to understand about me by the time they’ve finished reading?

Those are quite different questions.

I wanted to know what the therapist would actually be like.

This was probably the thing I noticed most.

I could often understand someone’s qualifications, theoretical approach and the problems they worked with.

But I still found myself wondering:

What would it actually feel like to sit opposite you?

Are you quiet? Warm? Direct? Curious? Structured? Informal? Will you challenge me? Will you give me lots of space?

Obviously a profile can never answer that completely.

But when I got even a small sense of the person behind the qualifications, I found them much easier to remember.

The best profiles made the decision feel smaller.

There was one other thing I kept noticing.

Contacting a therapist is quite a big action.

Profiles that explained what happens next, an introductory conversation, what I could ask, whether there was any obligation to continue, made that action feel slightly smaller.

I didn’t just know where the contact button was.

I knew what pressing it was likely to lead to.

I don’t think therapists need to become better marketers.

If anything, looking through these profiles has made me think the opposite.

There is already plenty of substance there.

The difficult bit is deciding which parts of that substance another human being needs in order to recognise:

That feels like a much more useful place to start.

If you want the practical version of the same subject, there is a separate note on writing a directory profile that is remembered.