Privacy & Confidentiality
What about privacy and confidentiality?
We recognize that the reasons that bring individuals into therapy are often intensely private matters. Both state and federal law, as well as the ethical standards of our professional organizations, forbid us from releasing information about you or your treatment to anyone without your consent. Parents are entitled to information about their minor children, but we also try to make therapy a safe environment for children and adolescents, and thus, as a general rule, we do not reveal specific details of what we are told, unless safety is an issue. There are a few exceptions to confidentiality protections. The main ones include our obligation to report: real and present danger of suicide or homicide (killing someone else), child abuse, probability that a client will do significant physical harm to an identifiable individual, and information that a judge orders us to release.