For Love or Money: The Fee in Feminist Therapy

Realize how you can charge what your services are worth and still care about your clients!

For Love or Money: The Fee in Feminist Therapy examines the rarely talked about topic of payment in therapy, taking a symbolic and psychological look at the meaning of fees to both the psychologist and client. This intelligent book offers firsthand advice and information concerning how gender can make a difference in your feelings about fees and how the managed care environment affects women clients. For Love or Money will help you handle your concerns about fees as it discusses payment for missed sessions, bartering, the meaning of fees with African-American women and with women in prison, and a model for pro bono work.

Since most therapists don’t discuss fees with colleagues, For Love or Money provides you with a way to gain information that might not otherwise be available to you. As a therapist, you will explore perspectives on what other therapists think about fees and what feelings other therapists have about the amounts they charge for their services. Some of the fee issues you will examine include:

• five typical therapist conflicts that are felt when it comes to fees
• the need to change managed behavioral health care to include equal payment for mental health care, length and type of treatment at the discretion of the client and provider, and appropriate training in women’s mental health issues for all health care providers
• setting a frame of therapy that includes session time, session length, duration of treatment, fee, confidentiality, and the “rules” of client participation to allow for successful psychotherapy
• sound clinical reasons for enforcing payment for missed sessions and considering a situation where flexibility is recommended
• pro bono work that is satisfying
  
  With this insightful and well-written book, you will explore issues such as transference, the symbolic meaning of money, and feelings you may have that could interfere with your ability to follow through with your own payment policies. For Love or Money examines many of the issues that surround the taboo topic of fees and will assist you with tackling this seldom-addressed and often uncomfortable subject for the therapist who wants to help her clients, but may feel distressed at setting and sticking to established fees.