Review Requests for Mental Health Practices: What You Can and Cannot Do

Reviews matter. They influence local ranking and they influence whether a patient picks up the phone. So most practices eventually start sending review requests.

In mental health, the standard playbook needs adjusting. Review requests that are routine for a dental office can create genuine privacy problems for a psychiatry practice.

This is not legal advice. It is a practical summary of where the lines tend to sit, and how to stay well clear of them.

Why mental health is different

Two things change the calculation.

First, a public review can itself disclose treatment. When a patient posts under their real name about your ketamine clinic, that post reveals a diagnosis and a treatment. If you prompted it, you have encouraged a disclosure the patient may not have fully considered.

Second, your response is constrained. You generally cannot confirm that someone is a patient, even to correct an unfair review. That single limitation shapes everything about how you handle reviews.

What is generally fine

Review requests are not off limits. The safe version looks like this.

• A general, unconditional ask. Inviting feedback without referencing a diagnosis, a modality, or a specific visit.
• Passive prompts. A line on a receipt, a link in your email signature, a sign at reception. The patient self-selects.
• Asking everyone the same way. Uniform process, no cherry-picking.
• Making it easy. A direct link removes friction and does not pressure anyone.
• Responding generically. Thanking someone for feedback without confirming a treatment relationship.

The principle: invite, do not steer. The patient decides whether to disclose anything.

What to avoid

These are the practices that create exposure.

• Incentives. Discounts or gifts for reviews violate the terms of every major platform and can trigger removal of all your reviews.
• Review gating. Surveying first and only inviting the happy patients is explicitly prohibited.
• Treatment-specific language. Do not send review requests that name the modality. "How was your TMS course?" turns your message into a record of treatment.
• Uploading patient lists to third-party tools. Contact details tied to treatment are protected information. Any vendor touching that data needs a BAA.
• Confirming care in a reply. "We are sorry your infusion did not help" discloses treatment publicly.
• Writing or soliciting fake reviews. Obvious, still common, and increasingly detectable.

The BAA point deserves emphasis

If a tool receives a list of people who attended your clinic, that list is protected health information by implication. It does not matter that no diagnosis is attached. Attendance at a psychiatric practice is itself sensitive.

Before sending review requests through any platform, confirm a business associate agreement is in place. Our position is documented on our HIPAA page.

Handling a negative review you cannot discuss

This is the hardest moment, and the instinct to defend yourself is the thing to resist.

A workable response has three parts: thank the reviewer for the feedback, state your general commitment to patient care, and offer an offline channel. Do not confirm they were a patient. Do not reference any clinical detail.

Move the conversation offline without ever acknowledging that there is a conversation to move.

If a review contains a factual impossibility, or names a staff member abusively, or is clearly spam, report it through the platform rather than arguing publicly.

Set realistic expectations on volume

A psychiatry practice will collect fewer reviews than a comparable dermatology or dental clinic. That is a feature of the specialty, not a failure of your process.

Steady accumulation beats a burst. A sudden spike of reviews looks inorganic and can be filtered. A few each month, indefinitely, is the pattern that holds up and that search engines reward.

Recency also matters more than most practices realise. Twelve reviews from this year signal an active clinic more strongly than forty from four years ago.

Where reviews fit in the bigger picture

Reviews are one prominence signal among several. They will not rescue a practice whose address is wrong on half the internet.

Get the foundational data right first, then let reviews compound on top of it. Our post on local pack ranking factors for TMS clinics puts reviews in order of priority against the other levers, and the complete guide to local SEO for interventional psychiatry covers the full picture.

Google publishes its own prohibited content policy for reviews, which is worth reading before you design any review request process.

Want to know what patients currently see about your practice across the network? Start with a free listing audit, or compare plans if you are ready to manage it properly.