April 8, 2025

Thanks to all of you who have contacted our Director of Policy and Practice, Laura Groshong, LICSW, to let her know you have sent messages to 7 Cups that you would like to be taken off their list. Please continue to check if your name is on the 7 Cups list. CSWA is working with the Psychotherapy Advocacy Network (PsiAN) to expand the number of clinicians who respond to 7 Cups. This effort is more complex than our work with CareDash was because 1) it has been in place and gathering clinicians’ information for much longer, and 2) it mixes peer counseling and licensed professionals together without acknowledging the differences in scopes of practice, training, and regulation.

CSWA will be writing a letter to the 7 Cups Legal Department to demand that the ways our professional information is being used without our permission, as well as confused with unlicensed people, be stopped. We will be sending more information on how to fight this attempt to make clinicians join the 7 Cups network or risk losing potential patients. Here is a summary of what we know so far.

The following letter has been sent to many clinicians when they ask to be removed from the 7 Cups list:

Thank you for contacting 7 Cups. 7 Cups is the world’s largest mental health community. We have over 570,000 trained volunteer listeners across 189 countries that provide support in 140 languages. We have reached over 73 million people. Often, we need to make referrals to licensed clinicians, shelters, and food pantries. That is why we built our provider directory and local support service. We are now starting to make referrals to local clinicians.

The goal of the local support systems (7cups.com/local) is to connect people online to services offline so they can get better help. We believe therapists are an important part of local support systems.

I understand that you may have reasons for wanting to be removed, but I wanted to share some additional context that you might find helpful. 7 Cups sends out thousands of free referrals to therapists every month. If someone were to complete the contact form on your profile, we would forward their information to you for follow-up. This would essentially be a free referral for you. We operate similarly with food pantries and shelters, as our goal is to connect people with local resources in their community.

We are providing therapists the option of a free premium month of being listed on 7 Cups to gain additional referrals. We are also providing this premium service to therapists free of charge if they cannot afford it as we think it is important for therapists to get referrals and build their practice. We want to feature as many therapists we can as part of the local support system.

If you do not wish to have your profile listed and decide not to become part of our local support network then please let us know and we will delete your profile within 48 business hours.

When members have checked to see whether their names were in fact removed, often they were not within the 48 hours as 7 Cups said they would. One malpractice insurer has recommended the use of our information without our permission be considered internet fraud and that a complaint be filed with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (https://www.ic3.gov/). This can be added to the list of actions to be taken to oppose 7 Cups from our previous post.

CSWA will continue to provide information about this unfair and possibly illegal activity as we have it.