Over the past few months, we’ve launched a major Quality Management (QM) initiative to further strengthen the quality, integrity, and trustworthiness of It's Complicated. This article gives you a full overview of the most important changes and what they mean for you as a therapist on the platform.
Some Context & Background
It's Complicated is growing, and we now count over 2,500 therapists from around the world among our community. With practitioners from nearly 70 countries offering sessions in more than 60 languages, we’re on track to becoming Europe’s biggest and most diverse therapy platform.
We’re extremely proud of this growth, and the diversity of our network is and will continue to be one of our core strengths. However, with this growth also comes greater responsibility. In a field as sensitive as mental health, maintaining quality and consistency becomes more challenging, especially across different countries, languages, and professional backgrounds.
That’s why we’ve been working on a major Quality Management project at It's Complicated, with the goal of increasing quality, trust, and legal compliance on our platform, without compromising the diversity and simplicity that makes It's Complicated unique. This article gives you a full overview of what's new, and what that means for you as a therapist.
Updated Requirements
First, we've reviewed and updated our qualification requirements for joining It’s Complicated as a mental health professional.
👉 First things first: Our platform remains open to a wide range of professionals — including psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, counsellors, therapists, social workers, and coaches.
However, our previous standardised requirements didn’t reflect the reality that professionals on our platform come from very different educational paths and legal definitions, depending on their country and role. For example, someone joining as a psychotherapist may have a completely different background than someone signing up as a coach or psychoanalyst.
To reflect this, we’ve now defined specific qualification requirements for each professional group, including details around education, training, and relevant work experience. Click here to view the updated requirements.
Standardised Professional Titles
In the past, therapists could enter their own job titles during registration, resulting in hundreds of unique titles across the platform. While this made the process simple and flexible for therapists, it also made it difficult for clients to understand what exactly these titles meant, or how they compared to each other.
That’s why we’ve now decided to introduce standardised professional titles. Here’s what’s new:
Therapists must now choose from a curated list of over 100 predefined titles.
These titles are based on thousands of therapist profiles and years of platform experience.
You can select up to two professional titles (e.g. “Clinical Psychologist & Coach”).
Titles will be automatically translated into German/English, so your profile appears consistently on both language versions of our site.
You can update your titles in the Edit Profile section of your dashboard (see screenshot below).
Additional Verification Requirements
In addition to verifying your qualifications and professional titles, something we’ve already required in the past, we’ve now expanded our verification process to include a few more key areas:
Identity: Therapists are now required to upload a government-issued ID to confirm they are who they say they are. Click here to learn more about ID verification.
Location: Therapists also need to upload a document that proves they’re actually based where they say they are. Click here to learn more about location verification.
These steps are designed to make our platform safer, more transparent, and legally compliant for both therapists and clients. You can upload your verification documents in the Verification Section of your profile.
Locking of Key Information
Once your professional title, name, and location are verified, these fields will be locked in your profile. That means you won’t be able to change them yourself, and any updates will need to be reviewed and approved by our team.
If you do make changes to one of these fields, a change request will automatically be created. Our team will then review the request and either approve it, ask for additional documentation (e.g. a new diploma if you're updating your title), or decline the request if it doesn’t meet our requirements. Once the changes have been approved, the updated information will be displayed in your public profile accordingly.
You’ll get updates by email and directly in your dashboard (see screenshot below), so you’ll always know what’s happening with your request. You can also cancel or resubmit your change request at any time.
Thank You For Your Cooperation
We know that these changes add a few extra steps, both for new therapists joining It’s Complicated and for those already on the platform. That said, we genuinely believe they’re an important and necessary step to keep things safe, transparent, and legally sound for everyone involved.
At the same time, we’ve done our best to make sure these updates don’t get in the way of what makes It’s Complicated what it is: a simple, diverse, and accessible platform for therapists and clients alike.
Thanks for your understanding and cooperation. And if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.
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