Why We're Starting Graduate Counselor Sessions at $20
Here is something I have noticed after years of working with performers, artists, freelancers, and entrepreneurs in New York City. The people who often need therapy the most are the ones most likely to talk themselves out of it.
Not because they do not believe in it. Because the math does not work.
When your income comes in waves, when a good month follows three slow ones, spending $150 or $200 a week on therapy can feel genuinely irresponsible. This is something I hear constantly from actors between roles, musicians between tours, and freelancers between contracts. So people put it off. They tell themselves they will start when things settle down. Things rarely settle down.
A model that already exists in clinical training
Supervised, reduced fee care is not new to healthcare. Teaching hospitals run resident clinics. Law schools run legal aid clinics staffed by students under a licensed attorney's oversight. The reduced cost reflects the training stage of the clinician, not a lowering of the standard of care. The client still receives real treatment from someone doing real clinical work, and a licensed professional is directly accountable for that work.
We built our graduate counselor program on the same structure.
What we are doing and why
Starting now, new clients who see a graduate counselor at CRC begin at $20 per session for the first four sessions. After that, the rate moves to $40 per session.
Every graduate counselor at CRC is supervised directly by a licensed clinician holding diagnostic privilege in New York State, meeting weekly to review casework, treatment planning, and clinical judgment. Sessions are conducted online, available to clients anywhere in New York State.
That first tier exists for one reason. Getting started is the hardest part. If the price of starting is what is standing between someone and getting help, I want to remove that barrier as completely as I can. Twenty dollars is not a token gesture. It is a real session with a real clinician, and I stand behind the quality of that work the same way I stand behind every session at this practice.
The move to $40 after four sessions is still a fraction of what many private pay therapists in New York City charge, and by that point, most clients have experienced what it feels like to show up for themselves consistently.
Who this is for
This rate is available to any new client seeing a graduate counselor at CRC. There is no income threshold, no application, no eligibility screening beyond the standard intake conversation. If cost has been the thing standing between you and therapy, this is built for you.
How to get started
If this sounds like what you or someone you know has been waiting for, the next step is a free 15 minute consultation. There is no commitment involved.
