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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........

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