Mental health care delivery is changing to include tele-health and concierge services, and Roberta Gallagher, South Miami’s most experienced marriage and family therapist, is on the cutting edge.
Broadening her private practice to include a come-to-you concierge component for her VIP South Miami clients is the latest step in Roberta Gallagher’s improvements to marriage therapy and mental health care delivery.
Gallagher has prioritized client needs for a different kind of counseling service before. At a time when it was advised to be a psychotherapeutic jack-of-all-diagnoses, she chose to zero in on couples and single adults with relationship problems. Over a number of decades, she has honed her clinical skills to an exceptional expertise for helping clients work through issues such as restoring trust after infidelity, dealing with sexual and cyber addiction, and returning to the dating world after the end of a long marriage or death of a spouse.
Being a licensed clinical social worker and licensed marriage and family therapist, Gallagher didn’t need more credentials to help marriages work better. But that did not stop her from pursuing special certificate trainings in relational life therapy and mediation for children of divorce. Gallagher has always been one to see new ways to provide services, and was among the first to offer relationship coaching by Skype and Facetime for her clients who travel frequently.
Concierge mental health services are still a new form of private practice, although they are increasingly popping up across the United States. One example even got the attention of the publication Psychiatric Times: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/transitioning-hybrid-concierge-practice. Even the esteemed online blog MarketWatch, published by the Dow Jones Company, wrote that concierge medicine was a growing trend: www.marketwatch.com/story/why-concierge-medicine-will-get-bigger-2013-01-17. Where doctors go, psychotherapists eventually follow.
Typically serving affluent communities in ways modeled by medical doctors with boutique retainer packages, concierge counselors come to the client’s home, office, or yacht club for intensive sessions lasting hours longer than the usual therapy appointment. Designed with the busy executive and professional in mind, as well as the philanthropist who travels, spends summers in different locations, and needs a counselor to come to them, Gallagher has seen the success of longer and less frequent therapy sessions.
“Normally, couples’ sessions in my office are just short of two hours,” says Gallagher, noting that many marital therapists do see couples for at least 75-90 minutes. “But in my new concierge ‘come-to-you’ service, clients clear their schedule for the afternoon. The three or four hour sessions are ideal for really digging under hardened emotional defenses, working completely through exercises without the pressure of an arbitrary time limit. As a result, concierge clients can make faster progress on relationship repair in three or four sessions than they might in several months of shorter sessions at my office,” Gallagher explains.
Gallagher sees individuals and couples who are highly motivated to fully explore their behavior and issues. She uses a number of creative methods to get beyond typical relationship impasses and conflicts. Her no nonsense style is cushioned in a warm compassion for talking through all that is painful in relationships. Her extensive website and blog can be found at www.RobertaGallagher.com.
For information call 305-663-0584, or send an email to CoachRoberta@RobertaGallagher.com.
