Social Media Policy

Power House Psychotherapy & Addiction, LLC PATIENT SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

This document outlines our Agency’s policies related to use of the Social Media. Please read it to understand how we conduct ourselves on the Internet as mental health professionals and how you can expect us to respond to various interactions that may occur between us on the Internet.

If you have any questions about anything within this document, we encourage you to bring them up when we meet. As new technology develops and the Internet changes, there may be times when we need to update this policy. If we do so, we will notify you in writing of any policy changes and make sure you have a copy of the updated policy.

“FRIEND” REQUESTS

We do not accept friend or contact requests from current or former clients on any social networking site (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). We believe that adding clients as friends or contacts on these sites can compromise your confidentiality and our respective privacy. It may also blur the boundaries of our therapeutic relationship. If you have questions about this, please feel free to discuss it with us.

FACEBOOK PAGE

Power House Psychotherapy & Addiction, LLC has a Facebook Page for our professional practice to allow people to share our posts and practice updates with other Facebook users. You are welcome to view our Facebook Page and read or share articles posted there, but we do not recommend that clients “like” the page as it may create a greater likelihood of compromised client confidentiality.

FOLLOWING

Power House Psychotherapy & Addiction, LLC may publish a blog in connection with our website and may post on Facebook. We have no expectation that you as a client will want to follow our blog. However, if you use an easily recognizable name on Facebook and we happen to notice that you’ve followed us there, we may briefly discuss it and its potential impact on our working relationship.

Our primary concern is your privacy. You are welcome to use your own discretion in choosing whether or not to follow us.

Note that we will not follow you back. We only follow other health professionals on and we do not follow current or former clients on blogs. Our reasoning is that we believe casual viewing of clients’ online content outside of the therapy hour can create confusion in regard to whether it’s being done as a part of your treatment or to satisfy personal curiosity. In addition, viewing your online activities without your consent and without our explicit arrangement towards a specific purpose could potentially have a negative influence on our working relationship. If there are things from your online life that you wish to share with us, please bring them into our sessions where we can view and explore them together.

INTERACTING

Please do not use messaging on Social Networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to contact us. These sites are not secure and we may not read these messages in a timely fashion. Do not use Wall postings, @replies, or other means of engaging with us in public online if we have an already established client/therapist relationship. Engaging with us this way could compromise your confidentiality. It may also create the possibility that these exchanges become a part of your legal medical record and will need to be documented and archived in your chart.

If you need to contact us between sessions, the best way to do so is by phone.

BUSINESS REVIEW SITES

You may find our practice on sites such as Yelp, Health grades, Yahoo Local, Bing, or other places which list businesses. Some of these sites include forums in which users rate their providers and add reviews. If you should find our listing on any of these sites, please know that our listing is NOT a request for a testimonial, rating, or endorsement from you as our client.

The American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code states under Principle 5.05 that it is unethical for psychologists to solicit testimonials: “Psychologists do not solicit testimonials from current therapy clients/patients or other persons who because of their particular circumstances are vulnerable to undue influence.”

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES

If you used location-based services on your mobile phone, you may wish to be aware of the privacy issues related to using these services. We do not intentionally place our practice as a check-in location on various sites such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc. However, if you have GPS tracking enabled on your device, it is possible that others may surmise that you are a therapy client due to regular check-ins at our office on a weekly basis. Please be aware of this risk if you are intentionally “checking in,” from our office or if you have a passive LBS app enabled on your phone.

TEXT

We do not allow texting to arrange or modify appointments, and to communicate with the Therapist and other agency’s staff. Please do not text us content related to your therapy sessions, as texting is not completely secure or confidential. If you choose to communicate with us by text, be aware that the texts may be in the logs of your and our telephone service providers. While it is unlikely that someone will be looking at these logs, they are, in theory, available to be read by the system administrator(s) of the telephone service providers.

Power House Psychotherapy & Addiction, LLC Website

You can access our website for your convenience at http://powerhousepsych.com/ as needed.

CONCLUSION

Thank you for taking the time to review our Social Media Policy. If you have questions or concerns about any of these policies and procedures or regarding our potential interactions on the Internet, do bring them to the attention of your primary therapists so that we can discuss them.