Is therapy confidential?

Yes. What you say to a psychologist stays between you and them, and is not shared with your family, your employer or anyone else without your agreement. There are a small number of narrow exceptions, all of them about serious risk of harm.

Some websites tell you confidentiality is absolute. It is not, anywhere in the world, and a practice that tells you otherwise is either being careless or is telling you what you want to hear.

Every psychologist works within limits set by law and by professional duty of care. They are narrow, they are about serious harm rather than about anything embarrassing, and they are the same limits that apply in any reputable practice. In broad terms a psychologist may have to act on what they hear when:

• there is a real and immediate risk to your life or safety;
• there is a real and immediate risk of serious harm to someone else;
• a child, or an adult who cannot protect themselves, is being harmed or is at risk of harm;
• they are required to disclose by law — for instance where a court orders it.

Two things are worth saying immediately after that list, because the list on its own reads harder than the reality.

These are rare. The overwhelming majority of people who come to PHC never come anywhere near them. Difficult, shameful, illegal-feeling and long-buried things get said in therapy rooms every day and stay there.

You would not be the last to know. Where a psychologist judges that they have to act, the normal practice is to talk to you about it first, to tell you what they intend to do and why, and to involve you in it wherever that is safe and possible. It is not a trapdoor. It is a conversation you would be part of.

If I come with my partner, does what I say alone get repeated? Couples and family work has its own arrangement, and it should be agreed at the start rather than assumed. Ask your psychologist how they handle individual sessions within couples work before you begin, and they will tell you.

My child is in therapy — do I get told everything? Not always, and that is deliberate rather than obstructive. A teenager who believes every word goes straight to a parent will say nothing, and then the sessions are worth nothing. Parents are kept informed at the level that helps, and a psychologist will normally agree with both the child and the parent at the outset what that looks like. The limits above apply to a child's safety in the same way they apply to anyone's.

Is a therapy group confidential? The psychologist is bound as always, and members are asked to hold what they hear in confidence — but a group is other people, and a promise from a group is not the same as a promise from a clinician. Anyone considering group work should weigh that consciously.

What about my booking details? Worth being straightforward: there is no booking form and no payment page on this site. You reach us by WhatsApp, by phone or by email, a person at PHC replies to arrange the appointment, and the booking payment is made in cash or by bank transfer — so no card details are taken anywhere and no scheduling company holds your appointment. What does pass through somebody else's system is whatever you write in the message itself, on the platform you write it on. What you later say in a session does not. If you would rather put nothing in writing, say only that you would like an appointment and we will take the rest by phone. This is set out in the privacy policy.

Written by the PHC clinical team. Reviewed by Prof. Dr. Tahira Yousaf, 19 September 2026.

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