OK, I have found the poll on how often you have contact with your therapist outside of session very interesting but has led to more curiosity.

There seems to be a lot of the contact for scheduling reasons, changes, being late etc... and not for support.

If you will indulge me one more time, I would love to see how often you contact for support and NOT scheduling related. Also how often you have sessions. I realized the out of session contact is greatly situational to how often you actually have sessions. If you meet once a week and contact never, you had once a week contact which would also be for the person that meets once a month and then contacts out of session weekly.

I would also be curious on the typical response rate of your therapist.

Feel free to add to anything you wish in comments, I would love to see details and that's what made me realize last time that it needed more details...LOL

SOOO, this poll will be large and I understand if you don't want to mess with it, but I think the information would be VERY interesting to see. I will try to organize the best I can and into categories as follows:

1. how often you see therapist for regularly scheduled in person sessions
2. what method of out of office contact do you have: (call office and leave message, call personal phone, text, email; any of the above)
3. how often do you contact your therapist outside of sessions
4. how quickly your therapist contacts you back
5. Last section is WHY you are able to contact: Scheduling ONLY, if you are in a crisis situation which either requires outside help such as hospitalization, to help bring you down/calm you from crisis situation to prevent hospitalization, help in extreme support situations but NOT only if it is life/death, you can reach out because you are feeling stressed or bad and need to hear an encouraging word or need to just know somebody is out there and you are not alone, anytime you want for any reason you want (you found a picture you wanted to share with your therapist or heard of something you thought they might like, etc....)
6. ***** edit**** this would not fit in poll but I would be interested in responses left in replys ...... Does your therapist ever initiate the out of session contact to check in on your well being for therapeutic reasons (NOT just scheduling related though) or for nontherapeutic reasons like sending a meme they thought you would enjoy or something like that (not inappropriate in nature and the appropriateness at all can be in discussion if you want, but I just mean as a 'friendly' gesture but not related to session material)



thanks

I do want to add, because as writing this, it seems it might appear I am looking for complaints on my therapist contact policy and it is quite the opposite. For the record, I have a wonderful therapist and I do contact whenever necessary which averages about once a week, with sometimes more and sometimes less I just got wondering what the 'typical' therapists policies are. I know every therapist and every client will have different needs but it interesting to see.