If you have questions pop over to the contact page and send a message – if the answer would likely be of interest or help others it will be added to the Q and A below! Thank you.
Yes! The plan is have the completed database structure ready for the UK by Summer 2025. There will be some features/sections that need to be changed for other countries. For example – therapists featured on the site have to be recognised by a respected national body and these will differ according to country so the database for each country will need to be changed slightly.
Another practical issue is language and translation – so anglophone countries will get tackled first.
There is an annual subscription fee for therapists to be featured on this website and this covers tech support, hosting fees, and (at some future date) a small amount of my time. The annual fee is less than a normal hourly fee for a therapist in the UK which seems reasonable – by being featured on here they enhance their marketing and reach a key target group.
The plans for this project include expanding to other countries, creating a training module for therapists in the hope of making far-reaching changes to how people with long term health conditions experience therapy. This requires a basic financial stability that covers costs and enables the project to grow.
This website was prompted by the needs and experiences of people with ME/CFS and Long Covid. However, there are many crossovers in experience with other conditions which take a long time to diagnose or are widely misunderstood. This can be for various reasons:
- Auto-immune illnesses such as Lupus can often be misdiagnosed as ‘psychosomatic’ with devastating results
- Women with Endometriosis can wait in pain for many years for diagnosis or treatment (8 years and 10 months in both England and Scotland, 9 years and 5 months in Northern Ireland, and 9 years 11 months in Wales according to a report by Endometriosis UK)
- Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and other forms of dysautonomia where ‘anxiety’ is often misdiagnosed due to misinterpretation of symptoms and tests not being ordered or interpreted correctly
- Lyme Disease where tests are unavailable or inadequate and there are wide variations in how tests are interpreted
- medical mismanagement or harm – for example in the case of the vaginal mesh scandal where survivors damaged by this ‘treatment’ for stress incontinence faced years of campaigning for their experiences to be recognised.
The broader issues are often the same, or with very significant overlap. Whilst the focus for this directory started with the needs and experiences of patients with ME/CFS and Long Covid the therapists listed will be extremely well placed to understand issues faced by people with similarly ‘psychologised’ or misunderstood and under-estimated health conditions.
When the directory list is launched it will be possible to search by key word – so therapists can mention specific conditions they are interested in/have an understanding of in their personal statements and these will show up in a search.
Thank you to photographer Richard Lewis for permission to use the banner image at the top of this page.
