Many psychologists don’t anticipate they’ll have clients who are celebrities, but it’s surprisingly common.
Most therapists don’t have Madonna walk through their door, but they will see the morning DJ from their local radio station, the retired sports star, or the chef who makes regular TV show appearances.
Another category is the celebrity-adjacent client, like the makeup artist or the football player’s mom.
Below are some considerations that come up when treating celebrity clients. If you’re a non-celebrity therapy client, many of the points here double as a consumer’s guide for how to recognize a trustworthy therapist.
Issues Careful Therapists Think Through With Famous Clients
1. How will you handle informed consent to gather information?
As a general rule, psychologists don’t gather information about their clients without the client’s consent, e.g., by looking at a client’s social media posts.
Imagine your client is your local morning radio host. Bantering with their co-host about their life is part of their show. If you usually listen, do you tell the client? Do you keep listening? What if a story they mention diverges from what they’ve told you? What if you notice a sign of a possible change in your client’s mood from how they’re talking on air?
With celebrity clients, inadvertent exposure to information about them becomes tricky. This is especially the case if a client is in the news. Since people come to therapy when they’re under stress, it’s obviously not an unusual scenario that you’ll see a client at a time when they have something major going on that is being reported on or gossiped about.
Plan ahead for both how you would handle various likely situations and how you’ll communicate your approach to your client. Keep it simple. Invite questions and open discussion. Clients who have extensive questions get them answered. Those who don’t have questions have their priorities respected.
2. Consider “peer supervision” with another psychologist who has extensive experience with celebrity clients.
In psychology, the term “supervision” means something a little different than what it means in ordinary usage. The supervisor isn’t in charge of their colleague’s work. They’re mainly just a resource.
In some places in the world, peer “supervision” is mandatory, even for very experienced psychologists. You have a formal relationship with a colleague and discuss your decision-making, treatment plans, and tricky situations with them.
If you’re seeing celebrities, consider having a peer supervision relationship with someone who has boots-on-the-ground experience with celebrity clients. If a supervisor has had a client who wanted a 10 p.m. session one week and a 6 a.m. session the next because they were on tour across time zones, and offered to pay double, that supervisor can help you navigate similar waters.
If you utilize peer supervision, you should disclose that to your clients. Include your supervisor’s name in your client onboarding process so clients can consent, and just in case it turns out your client knows your supervisor in some personal capacity.
In peer supervision, you usually don’t share identifying information about your clients, but informed consent is still good practice.
3. Be mindful of accommodations.
We’ve all heard the stories where medical doctors agree to do things for celebrity clients that they wouldn’t offer other people.
Take care that your accommodations, e.g., to protect privacy or fit their schedule, don’t deviate from standard treatment in a way that could be worse.
We always need to be mindful about any deviations from standard, research-based processes that could lead to inferior service or have unintended or unanticipated follow-on effects.
Your celebrity client deserves boringly normal service.
Peer supervision can be used to discuss how to make accommodations without affecting the integrity of the professional service being offered.
4. Be mindful of the questions you ask.
Psychologists tend to be curious people who are interested in human nature and social dynamics. It’s natural that a therapist might want to ask questions about the celebrity world or a client’s celebrity friend or partner. But make sure you’re asking only the questions you need to and that your client understands the reason you’re asking.
Consider the point of view of a celebrity who has been asked all sorts of prying interview questions that don’t relate to their work. Therefore, take extra care that the person understands why what you’re asking is relevant to the problem they have come to you to solve.
5. Review your position on treating just the problem the client came for vs. the person as a whole.
This is an ethical issue no matter who the client is, but it can come up more with celebrity clients.
If a client comes to you for, say, anxiety, to what extent do you stick to that brief as opposed to addressing broader considerations like substances, relationships, personality functioning, or neurodivergence?
The way professionals build trust with customers is by solving the problem the customer came for. We’ve probably all had the experience of taking a car to a mechanic and having them tell us about six other problems the car has. That can feel overwhelming, especially if we don’t yet know if the person is going to do a good, honest job of fixing what we came in for. Trust is built by solving the problem, not by maximizing the engagement.
Peer supervision is important here, and so is open communication with clients about your approach, right from the start of the relationship.
The Most Famous Person in Town Deserves the Most Ordinary Therapy
If you’re a therapist who googled how to best work with a celebrity client and found no other practical guides, I hope this post fills a gap for you.
If you’re a casual reader, you might have had your interest in this post piqued by the celebrity angle, but learned a bit about the kinds of ethical decision-making psychologists train extensively for.
None of these behind-the-scenes details are secrets. Therapists encounter these types of ethical issues on a regular basis. The amount of time and energy that goes into training for them and maintaining ongoing standards should be reassuring to clients. If you’re a therapy client who has curious questions about any of these topics, go ahead and ask your therapist whatever is on your mind.
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