Ask a Psychologist a Question!

What would a psychologist say? There’s an easy way to find out: just ask! Get feedback directly from a licensed psychologist on issues ranging from relationships to depression and anxiety, trauma, and a whole bunch more. Please note that replies are provided for informational and educational purposes only.

Important Update

We’re closing our question submission address for a bit to give our psychologists a breather and allow them some time to deal with our very large backlog of questions.

In the meantime, if you’d like to get some feedback from a licensed mental health professional, you can sign up to be personally matched with one of over 20,000 counselors, therapists and psychologists via a trustworthy and well reviewed online counseling service. Select answers for a brief series of questions designed to help find the best match for you, wait a few hours for the system to identify your best match, and you’re ready to go. Notably, the service has been used by over half a million people. (See below for a note on evaluating commercial online services and also for details of another service which provides secure online chat.)

How to Make Your Question a Great One

Our psychologists are happy to answer a vast range of different questions! And in an ideal world, we’d have the resources to answer every question that anyone might ever want to ask. Unfortunately, though, we can only manage to answer some questions, so we’re going to ask you to help make your question a great one.

We’re most likely to be able to publish a reply for those questions which enable the psychologist both to answer your specific question and to provide more general information on the topic that other readers may be able to apply in their own lives, in circumstances and contexts that may be very different from your own. If you can envision how the psychologist will be able to answer your question in a way that will also let other readers apply that answer in their own lives, then your question can be a great one!

Important Limitations

Under no circumstances will the psychologist enter into personal email exchanges, and under no circumstances will any patient-psychologist or client-therapist relationship be created by virtue of a reader sending a question to Ask the Psychologist or a psychologist answering a question. Replies are provided for informational and educational purposes only and are intended to support and complement — not replace — any existing relationship between a reader and their mental healthcare professional. All use of the Ask the Psychologist feature is subject to our parent site’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

When writing, please also keep in mind some of the things the service is not intended for:

Not for emergencies, not for suicidal or homicidal intent

Ask the Psychologist is NOT an emergency service or a therapy service, and it is not suitable for addressing suicidal or homicidal intent. If you are feeling suicidal, please consider contacting your physician or an organization such as The Samaritans or Befrienders International immediately. Our automated filters may discard questions focusing on suicidal or homicidal intent, and our psychologists have been instructed to delete any questions which they do receive that focus on those topics.

Not for interviews or class assignments

Ask the Psychologist is not intended for conducting psychologist interviews for essays or class assignments. Please do not send our psychologists lists of questions you would like them to answer for your assignment.

Not for ‘advice’ or ‘agony aunt’ questions

Ask the Psychologist is not intended for dispensing advice or commiserating.

Not for questions over 500 words

Due to the number of lengthy letters we have been receiving, we now must ask that you please limit questions to 500 words or fewer. Letters over the 500 word limit will not normally be answered. In addition, please include your question only in the body of your email — all attachments are removed by our system automatically, before reaching the psychologists.

Not for contacting a specific psychologist

Please do not mark questions for the attention of any specific psychologist, as questions are distributed randomly to members of the team.

Sending Your Question

When you write to Ask the Psychologist, please provide only the information that you consent to have published on this website. In other words, if you would like your name to appear only as initials, please include only those initials when you sign your letter. If you would like your full name to appear instead, go ahead and include it, but only if you are happy for us to publish it. We’d be glad to have a rough idea of your location (city, or if that is too specific, state or country), but it is not required. Questions may be edited for clarity. Your email address will not be published.

Please remember that only some questions will be published, together with replies: selection of which questions will be published is at our sole discretion. Because we’re usually running with a significant backlog of letters and replies, please be patient. If your question doesn’t show up right away, please check back, as it may be queued to be published after a few days or even weeks.

If you’d like to find out automatically when your question is published, you can listen in as each reply is published just by ‘liking’ our parent site CounsellingResource.com on Facebook. Alternatively, you can follow AskThePsych.com on Twitter, or sign up to receive the same updates by email — just click on the envelope graphic in the sidebar and select ‘Ask the Psychologist’ as one of your topics.

To send your question to one of our psychologists, please give us a shout at:

(Closed temporarily: please see the page on personal matching with a practitioner which we describe in more detail at our parent site.)

Alternatively, you can also submit a question for free via our commercial partner; you can learn more about that online counseling option at our parent site’s page evaluating commercial online therapy.

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