Chelsea, Manhattan and online across New York State
I am Colleen Richards, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and a native New Yorker. I work with people who are functional on the outside and running on fumes underneath, and I take seriously that money, housing, work and history shape a mood as much as brain chemistry does.
No intake bot, no waitlist form that goes nowhere. You reach me, and I reply within one business day.
Hope Psychotherapy
Most therapy in New York is priced for people who already have room to breathe. I built this practice differently. Same clinician, same depth of attention, whether you are a partner at a firm on Sixth Avenue or you are three shifts deep and covering rent by the week.
I have worked in Manhattan private practice, in community settings, and virtually with organisations across the city. What that taught me is simple and slightly unfashionable to say out loud: symptoms are rarely just personal. Panic that shows up every Sunday night is telling you something about Monday. A depression that lifts on payday is not only a serotonin story. Good therapy holds both the inner life and the conditions it is living in, and refuses to pretend that only one of them is real.
Beyond the couch
Liberation psychology asks a second question after the usual one. Not only what is happening inside you, but what has been happening to you, and who benefits from you believing it is your fault.
That framing does not let anyone off the hook and it is not a politics lecture in a therapy room. It is practical. When a client stops treating exhaustion as evidence of weakness and starts treating it as information, something loosens. Shame takes up less oxygen. There is finally room to decide what you want to do about the thing, rather than spending the whole hour defending yourself against it.
Alongside that sits a straightforwardly humanistic belief: you are the expert on your own life, I am a specialist in the process, and the relationship between us is the part that does the heavy lifting. Research has said this for fifty years. The alliance predicts outcome better than the brand name of the modality does.
Who ends up in this room
People whose work is also their identity, which means a bad review is not feedback, it is a verdict on a person.
Bodies that are assessed for a living, careers with short runways, and an industry that rarely asks how you are.
High functioning, well compensated, quietly dreading Sunday evening for reasons that never quite get said out loud.
Clients who have been asked by past therapists to justify how they earn before anyone got round to helping.
Services
Every one of these is ordinary human difficulty, not a defect. Each page below is written honestly about what the work involves and what it does not promise.
Weekly one to one work that goes past coping strategies and into the patterns underneath them.
Read moreFor single incident trauma and for the long slow kind that came from growing up somewhere unsafe.
Read moreWhen the alarm never fully switches off, or when nothing has felt like anything in months.
Read moreFor people whose income, identity and self worth all sit inside the same fragile thing.
Read moreWhorephobia free, non pathologising care from a clinician who will not ask you to explain the industry.
Read moreHarm reduction and abstinence are both real goals here. You choose the one you want.
Read moreGetting started
The hardest part of therapy is usually the part before therapy. I have tried to remove as much friction from it as I can.
Free, no notes taken, no obligation. You tell me roughly what is going on. I tell you honestly whether I am the right clinician for it. If I am not, I will name two or three people who might be, and I will actually follow up to check you got seen.
Fifty minutes. We go through history at whatever pace you can stand, and we agree on what would make the next few months feel different. You leave with a plan rather than a diagnosis label and a leaflet.
Most people start weekly. Every six to eight weeks we stop and talk about whether it is working, and I mean properly talk about it, including whether you want to keep going. Therapy that cannot be questioned is not therapy, it is a subscription.
Access and fees
I publish my rates because hiding them wastes your time and mine. I hold a set number of reduced fee places at any given moment for people who could not otherwise be here, and those places are part of the plan rather than a favour.
I am out of network with insurance plans, which in practice means you pay the session fee and I provide a monthly superbill for reimbursement. Many New York plans reimburse a meaningful share of an out of network session once a deductible is met. The fees page walks through exactly how to check yours in about ten minutes, including the four questions to ask your insurer.
I do not think anyone arrives in therapy weak. People arrive tired of carrying something alone.
There is a version of this work that treats you as a set of symptoms to be reduced. I am not interested in that version. The people I sit with are usually extremely competent, often the ones everybody else leans on, and almost always convinced that needing help is evidence of a flaw.
It is not. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it is fixable in the sense that matters: you can stop living at the mercy of a pattern you did not choose.
Colleen Richards, LMHC
From the journal
The body starts bracing before the mind admits anything is wrong. What that particular kind of dread is usually telling you.
Why rejection lands like a personal verdict for artists, and how to build a self that survives a bad year.
Money is the last taboo in most therapy rooms. It should not be, because it is running half the anxiety in this one.
A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Fifteen minutes on the phone is usually enough to tell whether we are a fit.