Red Flags in a Therapist or Coach Profile
Nine things that should slow you down, and the two that should stop you entirely.
Most profiles are fine. These are the ones that should make you look twice, ordered roughly from mild to serious.
## Outcome promises
Anyone promising to save your marriage, guarantee results, or fix a pattern in a set number of sessions is selling certainty that does not exist. We remove this language during profile review, and if you see it anywhere, treat it as a signal about judgement.
## Eleven specialisms
A list covering trauma, addiction, grief, parenting, career, anxiety, intimacy, business coaching and spirituality is a wish list. Depth is narrow by definition.
## Clinical language without a licence
The most useful flag on this list. If a profile describes treating conditions, diagnosing, or providing therapy while nothing on the page names a licensing body, the claim and the credential do not line up.
## Credentials with no issuing body
Letters, logos and certificates that never name who awarded them. Real credentials name a body you can look up.
## Vagueness about method
If you cannot tell from the page what a session involves, and the person cannot tell you in two sentences when asked, that usually reflects how the sessions run too.
## Pressure to buy blocks up front
Packages of ten sessions paid before you have had one shift the risk entirely onto you. Booking one session at a time is normal and should not be discouraged.
## Pushing you off the platform
This one is serious. Moving payment or sessions off platform removes your dispute route, your record of what was agreed, and any refund mechanism. It is a breach of our conduct standards and grounds for removal. Report it.
## Boundary blur
Personal friendship offers, unusual contact hours framed as devotion, or discussing other clients in any identifiable way. All of these are ethics issues for a licensed clinician and judgement issues for anyone else.
## Refusing to say what they do not work with
Everyone has limits. A professional who will not name theirs either has not thought about scope or does not intend to refer.
## The two that should stop you
Clinical claims without a licence, and any pressure to take the arrangement off platform. Both remove the protections that make the rest of this manageable.
## What to do about it
Report the profile from the profile page. Reports reach a person on our team, not the professional. We re review profiles when reports come in, and outcomes range from a required edit to removal with refunds to affected clients.
The full standard we hold people to is on [how we verify](/how-we-verify).