Apparently Ts do look us up on social media

I'm pretty sure my T hasn't looked me up on social media but I would love it if she would. Having so little time during a session to share about my life, any info online that she got could be a time-saver and give her maybe more insight about my life (not that I post anything very personal online)

And, to me, it would demonstrate her interest which I would appreciate. Still, I'm sure she doesn't - not because she's not interested but why should she spend the time?

My T hates social media, so i can pretty much guarantee that she has never looked me up, nor would she want to I dont think.

It is against facebook terms of use to create a fake profile. Meaning it would be extremely unethical and possibly illegal for a therapist or any other professional to create a fake profile to look someone up. It is questionable for someone to use their own profile for business use in order to get info on another person. It is acceptable to view public facebook information which doesn't require a login.

This is information straight from an attorney who sets the standards for how I can go about locating people in my line of work (not behavioral health, but social services related).

That being said my online therapist has a business page. I liked it. She said "I saw that, cute dog." I had a dog as my profile picture. If she looked beyond that I dont know however I think the implied consent would be there, since I liked her page, that I give her permission to view mine from her business page.

I don't see looking up anyone online as a problem whether it's a therapist, a client or anyone else. It's all publicly available information and I really don't understand what a big deal is about it. We live in the age when much more personal information about people in general has become publicly visible, mostly because they themselves put it into a public domain. There is certainly a dark side to it when the information is being bought and sold by private companies, but this is more of a political issue. On a personal level, I don't see anything immoral or unethical in looking at the info of a person, who has made a choice to make their information publicly available for anyone to see. Everyone looks up everyone online these days and everyone should expect that anyone would look them up online. No special "disclaimers" are needed and no one is obligated to inform people about it. In fact, I wouldn't work with a therapist who has it in their informed consent that they do online search on clients. To me, if they put it into their informed consent, they emphasize and blow out of proportion something that is natural and mundane. I wouldn't mind at all if they looked me up online, but if they talked about it in their informed consent, it'd feel creepy.

I don't post anything on Facebook that I wouldn't want to appear on the news.

I regularly purge anything that (in retrospect) I wouldn't want an employer to see, eg anything too political or simply excessive posting.

PS: I limit my attacks on Donald Trump to one a month.

I wonder what she meant by that? It doesn't sound very likely.

If a therapist told me they avoid snooping online, because they don't want to "desecrate the sacred therapy space" or some such thing, I would trust them even less. Want client trust? Act like a normal person. Stop condescending to everyone.

This scary PsyD has put together a social media policy. I would not interact with this person if you paid me. Illustrates just how convoluted and fraught these relationships are...

http://www.drkkolmes.com/docs/socmed.pdf

I highly doubt my T has ever looked me up, but I honestly wouldn’t care if he did. It’s all public info. I know that my friends and I look up people all the time if it comes up, it seems fairly normal to me and I don’t think a T would be unethical to do so. Having said that, I do see why many Ts would not want to look up clients, and I doubt I even will. I don’t think it’s wrong if anyone else chooses to do so though. I wouldn’t be upset to find out a T googled my name or something. If I’m worried about something being seen, I just use privacy settings.

Although now that I think about it a little more, maybe I do understand the other perspective better.

It’s sort of comparable to wearing revealing clothing in public vs. in session. When I’m on the street if anyone looks, it’s whatever, it’s right there plain as day and they can see it. But in session, just because my body is available to be looked at does not mean it’s ok for T to look. I shouldn’t have to cover up completely to expect him not to check me out (he does not do this FYI lol). I guess there’s a different level of respect expected.

Honestly both thought processes make sense to me.

It's interesting that the notion of wanting the client to have the choice about what information is available to the therapist has been interpreted as both "I am so very noble" and not wanting to "desecrate the sacred therapy space". It affords a grandiosity that just isn't there. Not in my attitude anyway. But each to their own viewpoints.

I don't think it is a big deal and would not hire a therapist who let me know they did. If I had made the choice to put something on social media, I would be making that info public. Public is public. And the idea a therapist wants to put forth they don't look as being something they do for the benefit of a client, to me, is either disingenuous or pointlessly and misguidedly aggrandizing.

I would hire one who said they just did not care or were not interested but I would not hire one who tried to put forth it was some professional thing they did for my benefit.

In my experience, whenever a T adamantly claimed that they always would or would never do something for my benefit did not lead to much good. Claiming extreme/pure methods and acts with such certainty is more often a defensive reaction than anything else, IMO. It's similar to a T saying they will never abandon the client, or will always keep the same kind of boundaries, I think. Not very mature and raises red flags more than any other effect, on me at least. If nothing else, it just makes therapy an even more unnatural construct and experience.

If we said that only what the client directly says to the T is supposed to be considered, then maybe we could even claim that considering unintended, non-verbal communication signs is wrong as well?

I think, this is largely a clash of the new and the old perceptions of what is considered "normal" at any given time.

There used to be a time when speaking out publicly was a big no-no for therapists. At the inception of the Internet it was unacceptable within the professional community for a therapist to have a website and later it was unacceptable for them to be active on social media or to use it at all. This attitude was justified by the notion of "client's benefit". These days I don't think anyone in the right mind would believe that it's unacceptable for a therapist to have a website, a social media presence and to be publicly outspoken about what they believe in and what they care about. Just like no one these days or in the last century would demand that we go back to riding horses instead of driving cars. Internet and online presence and being connected to the entire world where all the information we need is at our fingertips have become an organic part of our life, and with that "looking up" anyone online has also become a normal part of life just like using credit cards and cell phones for processing payments instead of checks and cash...

..Speaking of which..Once, when I was in my post-graduate training, we had a discussion just about that, about taking credit card payments from clients, which most therapists here, in the US are still not doing. Our instructor told us that she will never use card payment processing..guess why? Of course, for the "benefit of clients". For some crazy reason that I still can't understand she believed that professional boundaries are much more enforceable when you take checks or cash only.

The culture has changed and with any cultural change the ideas of what is and isn't acceptable, moral, ethical a.k.a "normal" also change. In fact, it was never unacceptable to look at publicly available information even before the Internet. The fact that now people put so much more out there doesn't change the fact that whatever they put out is public and that they made a choice to make it available for anyone to see. It's just in the old times, it'd take a considerable amount of time to obtain even publicly available information. Now, it takes a couple of minutes..So, no, therapists don't need to have so much time on their hands to look someone up online, it takes just a couple of minutes, and, no, nobody is "spying" on anybody. For those who didn't get the memo, it's the 21st century and looking at people's profiles online is a NORMAL behavior of everyone who chooses to live in the 21st century. .And, no, no one is taking away the client's choice how much they want the therapist to know. The client makes that choice any time they post anything online. When they post things on public domains they should assume that anyone, including their therapists, could look it up. If they don't think about that when they post, it's their problem and no one, including their therapist, is in a position to think about that for them. Adults should think for themselves.

The fact that a big part of our life is a virtual reality absolutely has its dark side, but that's the nature of the beast. Trying to stop a natural evolution by clinging to the old rules of conduct won't solve this problem. May rules and cultural attitudes have changed with the Internet and are continuing to change. You can't stop those changes. You either go with the flow and adopt to the new reality or suffer.

yup my own therapists past and present have found me on facebook. the interesting part in all this is sometimes they were not up front and I cant blame them I mean how many of us have googled our treatment providers to see what their credentials are, what the reviews are about them and happened to find our treatment providers social media pages ... facebook twitter, linkn, and sometimes their own personal websites, family photos, home and cell phone numbers.... its countless what you can find on the internet about treatment providers.

my point I dont get upset when my treatment provider finds my social media pages. we just have a good laugh over this post or that one, this pic or meme or that one...

line in the sand is that its the internet. if a person has an email account, amazon, facebook what ever its easy to find and up for public viewing..............Unless....... people remember to check their settings frequently and make sure their settings are the way they want them to be...

like one of my treatment providers and I talked about on this issue, if treatment providers didnt want to be found on the internet then they would not have any social media pages, they would not have an email account, they would not purchase any thing online and they would not comment on anything or "like" anything. or even advertise their business..... in other words go back to the days of before computers..... which of course is pretty much impossible, unless you are homeless, with no vehicle, no cell phone, no library account... no anything. not even mentioned in documents that aare now accessible online.

my treatment providers and I just accept that the world we live in includes the internet and we are going to purposely and accidentally find information about each other. its just how things are now.

My treatment providers and I also live by the moto of if its something I dont want my friends, family, my treatment providers the whole world to know about me then it doesnt belong posted anywhere on the internet. the internet is like an open post card going through the postal service, anyone who picks up that card can read whats on it.

amandalouise that is something that is true if we make our facebook viewable by all. We can also choose to have facebook only viewable by friends and that makes curiosity seekers able to find less info.

My old T, whom I only saw for about 4 sessions apparently looked up my husband on FB as I use a fake FB name. Obviously she knew his first name as my real surname and found him, it popped up on his screen as “Do you know xxxx xxxxxxx?” as a friend suggestion, 2 days after I terminated. We have no friends in common, this was when FB went through a stage of suggesting the names of any non friends who looked up your page.

You say this as if they don't do this anymore -- do you know if they still do this? I have been very paranoid because of this. I have a fake account for viewing profiles of people (yes, like my therapist) because I don't want them to know I looked at their page. However, when I used this profile to look at my real page (and vice versa) neither showed up as a friend suggestion.

I wouldn't care if my T looked me up because I'm not on FB or Twitter or Instagram. If she cares enough to look me up on Linked In that's fine.

I have Facebook/Instagram/Twitter accounts that're very easy to find if you know my full name. I don't hide anything there. So if they wanted to look, I wouldn't really care.

I have another set (including a WordPress blog) that has little-to-no identifying information on them including hiding my contact info from a whois/dns lookup. That's mostly because of my employer and wanting to create space though.

I'm sure it's not all that hard to figure it out, if people really wanted to.

yes settings are a huge part of this, which is why I did mention this in my post.

checking settings frequently and making sure they are the way you want them does sometimes work but there are rare situations where facebook has admitted to making changes to their site with out notifying members. these changes sometimes mess up the settings or allows what we dont want seen to be seen no matter why you are on facebook or your profession or lack there of, or student or lack there of...

theres also the situaiton where for example facebook is search able with google, safari and others. if it wasnt you would not see selections ingoogle searches and images that lead you to treatment providers to begin with.

I frequently post generic memes and non personal info pics(flowers, lakes.....) I had my facebook settings at only friends then discovered by goggling a favorite flower, then clicking on images and theres my personally decorated one of a kind (because I made and painted it) flower pot with the flower I painted on it. when I clicked into that image (google images shows the picture then above it is the link where that image comes from ) I clicked on the image link above the pic and it took me to my facebook page photo from there I could with out logging in and with a generic computer was able to continue looking at all my albums in my facebook account. I did notify facebook that this happened. I got the generic thants for reporting notification, then a generic apology stating their policy pages were very clear that google does have access to facebook and to not place anything we do not want others to see. then they told me how to review my facebook of everything I had posted since registering so that I could remove anything I did not want google to have access to.)

my point ideally and in a utopian world yea settings should work but heads up it doesnt always.

I don't think my therapist has time to look me up on social media. If he did all he would find are pets and mental health related things. Im not surprised anymore every body can look up almost everyone we live in a virtual world. I do try to keep most of my social media private however if people are really wanting to find me they will it's not hard.

My therapist looked me up. I dont mind. If you know my real name I am all over the internet. T and I are friends on facebook. I dont put anything on facebook that would embarass me or make me worried someone would think something bad.

You say that to me?

My T is a guy, btw. But I guess I've heard enough stuff from friends about people blowing up on Facebook about who has posted what when, and isn't so and so a terrible liar and accusations all the time about backstabbing and two facing and on and on. Many facebook posts that people have told me about seem like an electronic version of one of those sleazy talk shows where people are always yelling and screaming and cursing.

I believe that people discuss social media in therapy as something that is vexing them. And he sees a lot of couples, so maybe that's more likely to be the case. Like who's this friend and why did he like your photo?

yes, i have had similar happen with my ex-T. he was suggested to me three separate times as a 'friend suggestion' after i had terminated. we have no FB friends in common and i had not been viewing his profile. plus i have all my contacts on my phone blocked from FB.