Articles from the PHC team

Most people who contact PHC have been thinking about it for a while, and most of them arrive with the same handful of questions. Whether they need a psychologist or a psychiatrist. What actually happens in a first session, and whether they will be asked to talk about things they are not ready to talk about. What it costs and why nobody publishes a figure. Whether what they say stays in the room. Whether a child's difficulty at school is worth having assessed at all.

These are not small questions and they are not idle ones. They are the questions that decide whether somebody picks up the phone, and answering them badly — or answering them with a sentence that ends in call us to find out — is one of the reasons people who need help do not get it.

So the articles here answer them at length, in plain words, and they tell you the parts that are inconvenient for us as well as the parts that are not. Each one is written to be useful on its own, whether or not you ever become a client of ours. Where the honest answer is that depends, the article says what it depends on, so you can work out your own answer rather than be told to ring somebody.

Each article names the clinician who checked it before it went up, with the date it was last reviewed. If any of it is out of date, that date is how you will know. Where an article was written by our clinical team rather than by one psychologist, it says so — we would rather tell you that than put a name on work a single person did not do.

If you are trying to work out whether to come at all, read psychologist or psychiatrist first and what happens in a first session second. Between them they answer most of what stops people at the booking stage.

If you are worried about a child, start with does my child need a psychological assessment. It is written for the parent who is not sure whether they are overreacting, which is the position almost every parent is in when they first ask.

If the thing holding you back is money, or privacy, the articles on cost and on confidentiality deal with both directly and neither of them ends in a sales line.

And if your question is not here, ask it. Message us on WhatsApp or email support@phchelps.com and a person will answer. We would rather answer a question than have somebody guess at it — and the questions we get asked most are how this list grows.

If you already know roughly what you are dealing with, the conditions pages describe how each difficulty commonly presents and how PHC assesses and works with it. If you know you want an assessment, the assessments pages set out what each one measures, how long it takes and what the report contains. If you want to see who you would be seeing, every clinician's qualification, supervised hours and areas of practice are on the team page.