COVID-19 has moved me completely online and I can only serve you if you live primarily in California and will be dialing or connecting to our sessions from within CA.
I provide ONLY TELEHEALTH appointments (video) beginning January 2021.
I will update my website with a planned date of re-entry into a physical office space.
Because I am online only for now, the only methods of payment are by card or online account (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, Discover).
Because I am an Associate MFT, I am not paneled by any private insurer, and thus all payments are out-of-pocket.
If you're curious why I don't accept any insurance plan right now, see below!
I have tended to work most with LGBTQIA adults and teens, artists and performers, other therapists or healing arts practitioners, corporate millennials (or younger), caregivers and guardians, single-and-dating people, and spiritual seekers.
Most often, people seeking self-improvement, relational or emotional intelligence, work-life balance and burnout prevention, or spiritual/transpersonal journey seekers find their way to me.
And parents often connect me with their higher-driven, highly-pressured teenagers feeling overwhelmed by life.
I do not work from a diagnosis lens.
I am happy to explore with you the parts of yourself that you think might align with certain mental health diagnoses, but because diagnoses are primarily a concern for insurance companies and billing, I do not utilize them. I would rather identify with you the parts of your life that require upkeep and attention.
Every state has their own regulatory checks and balances, including professional license titles. An "Associate Marriage & Family Therapist (AMFT)" is a practicing apprentice, working under the license of at least one fully-licensed mental health professional. I am supervised at two clinics by multiple licensed supervisors.
My path has taken me through years of materialistic corporate culture and years of transformational and spiritual work. So, I have experience juggling both.
So, I offer my spiritual lens a particular angle of therapy for those who want a reality-based, science-backed, grounded, pragmatic approach to mental health, with the uniquely curious, open, and emotional nuance that a spiritual lens brings.
I'm unable to write any letters in any capacity as a therapist if we are not already working together in a broader capacity.
To be clear, I do not provide medication or medical advice, and I do not provide "guide" services for altered-consciousness exploration. Instead, I provide pre- and post- care.
Yes! Depending on your needs, I have other great therapists who might suit you better and can put you in touch with them. I also can refer you to other directories and networks, or point you in a better direction at the very least, if I am able.
I charge $500 to attorneys for subpoenas requiring my response, and will require a ROI (Release of Information) from you to do so.
If I accepted insurance, by law, I would be working for and responsible to your insurance company first, with your best interests a secondary consideration.
Insurance companies do not work for you or for us therapists -- they are profit-driven entities that try to control and use you and us for their profit. My mission is to help you as much as possible -- and that means cutting out the negotiating and mediating role of the insurance panels.
That aside, all insurance companies contract with professional services (e.g., physician, dentist, counselor) utilizing a formulae profit model. In turn, they provide client-consumers an affordable co-pay, yet your treatment plan has already been pre-designed, and most likely capped.
So, the reality? The insurance panels require these steps: Diagnose, reimburse the least expensive treatment plan, and get you in and out of therapy as quickly as possible. Also, therapy is rarely a quick fix process, e.g. what if you and your family need more sessions, but your plan is capped -- now what?
For your insurance plan to 'work', the therapist is REQUIRED, by the insurance networks, to diagnose you, formally, on paper, after the first session.
This means that, forever, you will have a new pre-existing medical condition.
Your records will permanently reflect a formal diagnosis, whether accurate, true, forced, or not -- and it will follow you. The consequences of this will depend on your life, and whether your records come under scrutiny by employers, future medical approval boards, and so on.
Andrew Amick AMFT 121201
Supervised in California by Erica Siegal LCSW and Gary Pearle LMFT