“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
—Anaïs Nin
We offer a complimentary 15-minute introduction via Zoom or telephone for you to get a sense of us and ask any questions you may have, and that allows us all to decide if it seems like a good fit.
We have office hours every day of the week by appointment. If our schedules are full, we will do our best to offer referrals to trusted colleagues (though since the pandemic, we realize it has been hard to find experienced therapists with openings — this limits our ability to refer, also, but we do try). Because of our specialized work, we sometimes keep a time-limited wait list for those interested. Appointments are 50 minutes. We reserve regular weekly times for our clients and see this as a mutual commitment.
We use a HIPAA-compliant electronic health record in our practice, not unlike what most of us use when we see our doctor. When we set up your initial appointment, you will receive a private link to our secure client portal via email. You can complete all basic intake paperwork, including electronic signatures, in the portal. For future reference, there is a link to the portal for established clients in the top right corner of this website.
At your first appointment, we will focus on assessing your concerns and beginning to develop a plan for addressing them.
Fees
Evanston Relational Psychotherapy accepts Zelle (a bank-to-bank payment platform that has many member banks), checks, or cash (when in-person), due at the time of service. We are not set up to take credit cards.
As part of our commitment to social justice and accessibility, each of us offers some reduced rate appointment slots for clients who are an especially good fit for what we offer and for whom our standard fees would be a significant barrier. Please discuss this with us at your initial contact and we can let you know whether there is current availability for sliding scale. While, as a small practice, we are limited in the number of sliding scale fees we can offer, we contribute monthly to organizations that facilitate access to mental health care for all. Since 2020, we have contributed monthly to The Loveland Foundation, an organization supporting access to psychotherapy for Black women and girls. They’re a great organization — check them out.
Our fees, based on licensure, certifications, and years of experience:
Amy Steinhauer’s session fee: $225
Krista Wilson’s session fee: $180
Christina Helm’s session fee: $180
Insurance
Evanston Relational Psychotherapy does not participate in any insurance panels, so we are considered out-of-network providers. Likewise, we are opted out of the Medicare system. We are eligible to see Medicare beneficiaries under a private contract, where Medicare cannot be billed.
Monthly superbills (insurance statements) are available for clients, emailed to you and in our client portal. You may submit the superbills to your (non-Medicare) insurance company for reimbursement based on your plan. Please know that if you submit statements to insurance, they will require a mental health diagnosis code, and sometimes require further information such as treatment plans and progress notes.
Insurance companies have a medically based model, and will only pay for treatment deemed ‘medically necessary.’ This model is based on functioning level and symptom relief, rather than on depth of understanding, satisfaction, happiness, connection, pleasure or meaningful experience.
Sometimes the medical model fits well with a person’s psychotherapy needs and sometimes it does not.
If you submit a superbill to your insurance company, they have the right to see and audit your treatment records. If they deem that your treatment is not medically necessary, they can refuse to pay or initiate “clawbacks,” where they will recoup money from you that they have already reimbursed for your care. We are very careful to make our session coding and diagnoses accurate, but this may mean that your diagnosis will not be considered a “medically necessary” one. In particular, many insurance companies will not pay for couple therapy (when the focus of treatment is on the relationship rather than one partner’s mental health problem) or some sex therapy diagnoses. We do see very occasional exceptions to this.
We strongly recommend contacting your insurance company if you wish to use insurance to ask about your out-of-network mental health benefits, and can provide you with the likely codes for your therapy. With this as with other things, we believe it is good to be informed about risks and benefits, pros and cons, in order to make the best decisions you can make for yourself.