Most people haven’t applied that same thinking to therapy. But maybe it’s time we did.

Something Is Shifting in the Mental Health World

Over the past several years, the mental health industry has attracted enormous amounts of outside investment. Venture capital firms, private equity groups, and even large insurance corporations have recognized that demand for therapy is growing- and they’ve moved in accordingly.

What this looks like on the ground: therapy platforms that advertise heavily on social media, promise fast access and low prices, and operate at massive scale across dozens of states. Independent practices that were once owned by a local clinician get acquired and absorbed into larger networks. Insurance companies have begun investing in or partnering with the very therapy platforms they reimburse, creating a cozy arrangement that raises real questions about whose interests are actually being served.

We want to be clear- we’re not saying everyone who works at or uses these platforms is doing something wrong. Many good therapists work within these systems because they have to, and many clients find them because they don’t know there’s another option. What we are saying is that the forces reshaping the mental health landscape right now are primarily driven by profit, not care. And that matters.

When Therapy Becomes a Product

There’s a reason therapy has traditionally been a deeply local, deeply human practice. Healing happens in relationship. It happens in the particular way your therapist remembers what you said three sessions ago, or notices something shift in your body before you’ve found the words, or stays curious about you as a whole person rather than a set of symptoms to be managed.

That kind of care is hard to scale. And scale is exactly what large, investor-backed platforms are trying to achieve.

One concern we hear more and more in our field is the push- quiet for now, but real- toward replacing human therapists with AI-driven tools. Chatbots. Automated check-ins. Algorithmically generated coping suggestions. We want to name this plainly: we don’t believe an AI can provide therapy. We believe therapy is a fundamentally human exchange, and that any system that positions automated tools as a substitute for a real therapeutic relationship is cutting corners in ways that can genuinely harm people. This isn’t technophobia. It’s a values statement. Humans deserve to be cared for by other humans, especially when they’re vulnerable.

What Gets Lost When Local Practices Disappear

When a locally owned therapy practice closes or gets absorbed into a larger network, the community loses something specific and hard to replace.

Local therapists are embedded in the communities they serve. We know Tucson. We know its particular stressors- the heat, the border politics, the housing crunch, the tension between rapid growth and a city that wants to *stay weird*. We have relationships with other local providers, with community organizations, with the social and cultural fabric of this place. That context matters clinically. A therapist at a national platform handling hundreds of clients across five states doesn’t have it, and can’t.

How to Shop Local for Your Mental Health Care

So what can you actually do? Here are some concrete steps:

Ask who owns the practice. It’s a completely reasonable question. Is this a locally owned business, or is it part of a larger network or platform? Independent practices will usually be proud to tell you.

Be skeptical of heavy advertising. Local therapists generally don’t have marketing budgets. If you’re seeing a lot of polished ads for a therapy service on social media, it’s worth asking how they’re funding that- and what they expect in return.

Check Psychology Today and TherapyDen. Both directories let you filter for independent practitioners. TherapyDen in particular has a strong emphasis on values-aligned, social-justice-oriented therapists if that matters to you.

Ask about insurance arrangements. Some large platforms have exclusive or preferred relationships with certain insurers. A local therapist who takes your insurance independently is a different arrangement than one whose practice is effectively co-owned by the company reimbursing them.

Refer your people to local therapists. Word of mouth is how independent practices survive. If you’ve had a good experience with a local therapist, tell someone. That referral is genuinely valuable in a way that liking a social media post is not.

If cost is a barrier, ask directly. Many local therapists offer sliding scale fees. We would rather work with you at a reduced rate than lose you to a platform that doesn’t actually have your best interests at heart. The conversation is always worth having.

This Is About More Than Therapy

We’re living in a moment when consolidation of power and money is happening everywhere- in healthcare, in media, in housing, in retail. Small, human-scale institutions are being steadily replaced by large ones optimized for shareholder returns. Therapy is not immune to this, and neither is Tucson.

Choosing a local therapist is a small act, but it’s a meaningful one. It’s a vote for the idea that care should be provided by people who are genuinely invested in your wellbeing and in the health of this community not by platforms that see your mental health as a market to be captured.

We’re here because we love this work and we love this city. We’d be honored to be your choice for such personal, healing work.

Did you know each person dreams, on average, 6 dreams a night? That means if you live to be 80 years old, you will have spent 6 years of your life dreaming! There are many solid theories about why we dream and research that shows us dream deprivation leads to poor health outcomes. So we know that dreaming is important, even if we don’t recall them upon waking.

Instead of speaking to functionality, as there is extensive information and research out there on that, I want to know:

What would it look like for you to cultivate a relationship with your dreams?

Dreams are as natural as our breath, our digestion, our heartbeat. I want to propose that a relationship with our dreams is a deeper relationship with ourselves. Sure, we don’t need to pay attention to these processes in order for them to keep functioning but when we do, we enter into a greater sense of aliveness, awareness, and sensitivity. We move from objectivity into relationship. Cultivating, and tending to it, is inherently meaningful.  Dreams humble us with their ludicrousness, horror, beauty, awe. They invite us into a deeper dialogue with nature, ourselves, and, as a result, those around us.

Many dreamworkers, while coaching people to enhance dream recall, will firstly invite people to take an interest in their dreams, and will subsequently offer a variety of ways to enhance dream recall. Journaling, recording, or drawing them for instance, even if they are simple fragments or feelings or colors. However, the late Jeremy Taylor, beloved and revered dreamworker, reverend, and activist, proposed that most people struggle with recall because they don’t have safe and encouraging spaces of interest to speak of them.

What if the therapy room could be one of those spaces?

Dr. Leslie Ellis, author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork, lists the following reasons that it should be:

• They are creative and engage our clients in the therapy process
• They point to our most salient emotional concerns
• They bypass our internal editing process and normal defenses and so are honest representations of our life situation
• Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that is stuck or static
• Dreams provide diagnostic information and can be indicators of clinical progress
• Dreams help to regulate our emotions and are implicated in memory consolidation
• Dreams can be a safe pathway to working with trauma

I like to think of dreaming as the space where our egos go to bathe and merge back into the source from which they came. And working with our dreams intentionally, while we’re awake, helps us integrate what we saw, heard, felt, and experienced, allowing our new sense of ego to emerge in the process.  But most of all, it communicates to this part of ourselves that it is valuable, worthwhile, and meaningful.

Taylor refers to dreams as “over-determined”, meaning that they have many meanings. On a physical level, they may bring us information about our health. On an emotional level, they might show us feelings that are repressed or inflated. On a spiritual level, they can reveal where we truly feel connected in our lives.  Dreamwork inspires us, literally breathing life into us, as the etymology of ‘inspire’ goes. And the more dreamwork we do, the more flexible our egos, and the more adaptable we become. We already work on the flexibility of our egos in therapy, but why not bring in the voice of our inner therapist?

Go ahead. Try it out. Let me know how it goes!

Interested in exploring your dreams more intentionally? Reach out here to schedule!