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You can review a therapist you’ve seen. What a review may say is constrained by Australian law.
Writing a review from your own account is being rolled out. Reviews already on profiles are shown as they are, and the screening below is what any new one goes through.

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Why the rules exist

Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law prohibits using testimonials to advertise a regulated health service. A review Open Therapy publishes on a therapist’s profile is our advertising, so it has to comply. The line: you can describe the service, but not the care.

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What you can write about

Yes

  • Booking, waiting times, availability, punctuality, cancellations
  • Admin — invoices, fees, rebates, Medicare, NDIS, paperwork, reports
  • The premises, parking, accessibility, video quality
  • Their manner and how they communicated — courtesy, clarity, feeling listened to
  • Languages spoken, appointment times, location

No

  • Any symptom, condition, diagnosis, or your reason for attending
  • Any treatment, technique, medication, assessment or test result
  • Any statement about outcome, progress, recovery or effectiveness — including negative ones
  • Any clinical recommendation, such as suggesting them for a particular problem
  • Any claim about their clinical skill or expertise
Implication counts. “I can finally sleep through the night” is a clinical outcome, and “she really helped me with my anxiety” names both a condition and an outcome. Neither can be published.
A publishable review that still says something useful: “Easy to book, ran on time every week, and the invoices came through the same day so my Medicare claims were straightforward. The rooms are up one flight of stairs with no lift.”

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Writing one

A rating from 1 to 5 and up to 2,000 characters of writing, published under your preferred name.

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How screening works

Every review goes through two stages, published only when both agree it’s clean: a blunt word list, and a model that reads it for meaning. A word-list hit sends the review to a person rather than rejecting it. Nothing publishes on a failure. A missing configuration, an unreachable model, a malformed answer, an “unsure” verdict, or a word-list hit the model didn’t agree with all mean a person reads it.

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What happens next

“Thanks — your review is live on the profile.” You get an email and a notification, and so does the therapist — the rating, and that it’s on their profile.
“We can’t publish this one. Australian advertising rules stop us showing reviews that mention symptoms, treatment or whether therapy helped. A note about booking, admin or how you were treated is fine.”Nothing is stored, so there’s nothing to appeal — rewrite it inside the boundary and submit again.
“Thanks — your review is with our team and will appear once it’s been read.”If they can’t publish it, you get an email with the specific reason and what you can say instead.
Screening errs firmly towards not publishing. A wrongly published review is an offence under the National Law.

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Ratings on profiles

A published review updates the therapist’s star average and review count, which is what the directory’s Highest rated sort reads. Reviews show as a rating, the words, your name and the date.

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Complaints aren’t reviews

A review isn’t the channel for a concern about someone’s conduct or clinical care. Write to governance@opentherapy.app, or raise it with Ahpra directly. See Safety and privacy.

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Can a therapist remove a review?

No. Therapists have no moderation, reply or takedown control over reviews on their profile. Screening is Open Therapy’s responsibility.