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Frequently Asked Questions

Our mission at TMH is to provide high quality mental health care using evidenced based services that are customized to fit your individual needs.

We were founded by expats to serve the foreign and returnee populations of Japan.

No matter who you are or what mental health services you need,
We are here for you!

Table of Contents

Fees & Payment

Our fees are 22,000 yen (tax included) for a 60 minute individual therapy consultation and 25,000 yen (tax included) per hour of the psychologist’s time for psychology services. We also offer 90 minute appointments for couples and families priced at 33,000 yen (tax included). If you have TRICARE health insurance, you may be able to claim and have sessions reimbursed or your TRICARE policy may cover our services directly, depending on your policy (e.g. TRICARE Prime, Select, Plus, etc). Please contact your insurer directly to confirm coverage.

We also offer a range of discounted prices, where appropriate, for clients who have to fund their own care themselves (i.e. are paying out of pocket). Our discounted individual therapy fees range from 13,500 yen to 19,000 yen (tax included) for a standard 50 minute consultation. Our couples and family sessions range from 20,000 yen to 28,500 yen (tax included) for a standard 80 minute consultation. Discounted psychology services are charged at 16,500 yen to 19,000 yen (tax included) per hour of the psychologist’s time.

Tokyo Mental Health and its partner, American Clinic Tokyo (for consultations with Dr Andrew Kissane for psychiatry services there) cannot accept Japanese National Health Insurance.

If your private insurance covers mental health services, Tokyo Mental Health can provide you with invoices and receipts showing payment for services. If necessary, your provider can write a short letter for your insurer about the service you are receiving to support a health insurance claim. When submitted, many insurance companies will use invoices to reimburse you for the cost of the session. Some insurers also require a psychiatric/medical recommendation from a clinic for services to be reimbursed. Please check with your insurer directly.

For in-person appointments at our Tokyo Mental Health Shintomi Therapy Office, you can pay using cash or credit card.

At our TMH Okinawa Mihama Therapy Office, only credit card payments are accepted for in-person appointments.

For online appointments, we use a digital payment service, Square, and we can only accept credit cards.

Please note: we do not accept JCB or Diners Club cards.

Tokyo Mental Health services are not medical services in Japan so they are not tax deductible on a Japanese tax return.

We are sorry but we do not offer any further discounts to services at Tokyo Mental Health.

Yes, we charge the full amount for any sessions that are cancelled with less than 24 hours notice and for any appointments that are missed. To avoid late cancellation fees, please ensure to contact your provider in advance if you are unable to make an appointment.

We recommend keeping appointment times since it can be difficult for therapists to reschedule appointments last minute. If you are unable to attend an appointment in-person, please consider attending via telehealth instead.

For parents, whose children may refuse to attend sessions, please consider having the appointment in place of your child. Your child’s therapist can also work usefully with you during that time.

Counseling Services

Tokyo Mental Health offers talk therapy services such as counseling and psychotherapy for individuals, couples and families.

We also offer psychological evaluations for both children and adults. These evaluations are useful to investigate  neurodevelopmental disorders or other neurodivergence. We can provide evaluations for ADHD, ASD, or specific learning difficulties.

Counseling is a broad term used to cover a range of talk therapies. Counseling and psychotherapy are often used interchangeably. There can be slight differences such as how many sessions, the focus of the therapy sessions, and how directive the therapist is. However, usually differences in counseling/therapy are due to therapists having different approaches and the approach taken will depend on your needs. If you want to learn more about counseling at TMH please click here for more information.

TMH providers primarily practice Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and humanistic therapeutic approaches, such as Person-Centred Therapy, as well as Systems Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy and the Gottman Method for couples and family therapy. We also have therapists skilled in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Narrative Therapy, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, Solution-Focused therapy and Psychodynamic therapy.

We offer our services in English, but we also have several bilingual providers who can offer many services in native Japanese, Mandarin, Malay, Spanish, and Sinhalese.

Yes, as long as the requested provider has availability during your requested  time, and the experience to match your needs, we are happy to match you with them.

Yes, we are happy to accommodate your needs. We understand that it is important to match you with a provider whom you would feel comfortable talking to. However, please note that this may incur longer waiting times for appointments, depending on our provider’s availability.

If you are based outside of Japan, we recommend that you seek services in your current country of residence. This is due to different regulations regarding counseling/psychotherapy services  in each country. Additionally, we would not be able to offer or refer you to any resources that would be available in your local area as our services cater to those currently residing in Japan. It is important to access services that can meet your needs and sometimes it is necessary for us to refer clients to other services, such as psychiatry. We are only able to provide such services for our clients who reside in Japan.

For psychology services, due to the nature of the assessments, we cannot offer ADHD or ASD assessments for those who are living overseas. Our assessments require clients to attend some portion of the assessment in-person. We also cannot guarantee that the report written would be useful in your local area. In this case, we would definitely recommend seeking psychologists in your area for assessments.

Appointment availability varies by provider schedule. 

Our Tokyo Mental Health Shintomi Therapy Office is open from 09:00 to 20:00, 7 days a week, including national holidays, so we can see you in the mornings or evenings, weekdays or weekends at a time that suits you. Please note the earliest appointment time is 9:00 and the latest appointment time is 19:00.

For TMH Okinawa Mihama Therapy Office, please check our location page for more information.

At times when we are experiencing a high volume of enquiries, we will be implementing a waiting list. Appointments can take approximately 4 – 6 weeks to schedule once you are placed on the waiting list. It may take longer to schedule an appointment if you wish to see a specific therapist due to the need to match both your and your desired therapist’s schedule. There may be occasions when the waiting list is not in place. In this case, appointments usually take approximately 2 weeks to schedule.

Please contact us securely here or email us. Once we receive your enquiry, a team member will let you know the steps in order to be placed on our waiting list.

You will need to complete some virtual ‘paperwork’. This is important as it gives us a better sense of the nature and severity of your concerns. We will ask you to confirm that you have completed this paperwork before we can see you for an appointment. After we receive confirmation from you and check that you have completed the necessary forms, we will place you on the waiting list.

Please note that we operate on a first-come-first-serve basis so we will be allocating appointments in order of when the steps are completed.

Psynary is a free online assessment tool used by Tokyo Mental Health and by Dr Andrew Kissane for psychiatry appointments at American Clinic Tokyo. We use this to better understand the nature of your condition at your first appointment and to measure the effectiveness of your treatment with us. We think that it is a good way to keep track of progress – or lack thereof. For clients, there is a benefit to being able to see, in a visual representation, how your treatment is going. For providers, it can be helpful for us to improve our service and hold us accountable for whether you are seeing results that meet your expectations.

The RCADS is an assessment tool used for children between the ages of 8-18 years old. Since Psynary is not an appropriate assessment tool for younger children we use the RCADS to help us track progress. We ask that both you and your child complete the questionnaire. Having these scores helps your provider to understand more about your child’s experience and about how you, as their caregiver, are perceiving their concerns. Your provider will use this information to form a treatment plan and will ask you to update the RCADS at regular intervals to track progress.

If you have any questions about these assessment tools please contact us. We understand that sometimes the questions may not seem relevant or the questionnaire may cause some discomfort due to the nature of the questions. If you are having a hard time completing the forms please let us know. We are happy to help you complete them.

If you have TRICARE insurance, sessions are 60 minutes for individuals and 90 minutes for couples and families. This meets TRICARE’s required standards for coverage. 

If you have an alternative private health insurance plan, you will need to confirm with your insurer regarding your coverage and accepted length of appointments.

If you are funding your care yourself (self-pay) then we recommend our discounted options, where sessions are 50 minutes for individuals and 80 minutes for couples and families.

Usually, an initial session or intake session, will be about you and your therapist getting to know each other and assessing whether you can continue the work together based on your needs and the therapist’s experience. Sometimes it may be necessary for your therapist  to refer to another provider who can better meet your needs.

The therapist will usually introduce themselves and let you know about their approach and expertise. They will then ask you for more information about your concerns, including history of mental health problems, past experiences of therapy if any, what your upbringing was like, what problems you are currently facing due to mental health and about issues of safety/risk such as suicidal ideation or self-harm. At the end of the session, the therapist will usually discuss with you about the next steps. You will be given opportunities to ask questions and share your expectations with your therapist.

The number of sessions is entirely dependent on individual needs. Additionally, some therapeutic approaches have outlines which can guide the number and structure of sessions.

Generally, short-term therapy could be anywhere from 6 to 16 sessions. Long-term therapy can be considered anything over 16 sessions. These are simply guidelines and the actual number of sessions will vary. Please discuss with your therapist if you have some expectations regarding the number of sessions. We are happy to work with you, especially if you have time limitations or price concerns. However, depending on the presenting issue, some concerns can generally require more sessions or might be ongoing over one’s lifetime such as trauma, personality disorders and sometimes psychosis.

Tokyo Mental Health provides talk therapy and psychology evaluation services, but we are not a medical clinic and are unable to prescribe medications or issue medical documentation at our offices. If you are interested in obtaining documentation or medication for mental health needs then you would need to set up a psychiatry appointment at  American Clinic Tokyo with Dr Andrew Kissane.

We cannot provide medication as we are not a clinic. You would need to contact American Clinic Tokyo and schedule a psychiatry appointment with Dr Andrew Kissane. Please be aware that there may be a 1-3 week wait for a new patient appointment at American Clinic Tokyo.

We can provide the following services at the American Clinic Tokyo with our psychiatrist Dr Andrew Kissane:

 A medical report for:

  • An insurer to support your claim for therapy services at Tokyo Mental Health
  • An employer when you want to claim social insurance and require a 診断書 (shindansho) for sick leave
  • A university or school to apply for medical leave or prove fit to return following a medical leave
  • An accommodation for an exam or other activity

We cannot provide:

Medico-legal work such as:

  • Court reports
  • Tribunal reports
  • Documents for divorce proceedings or custody battles
  • Applications for visas for medical treatment

Psychology Services

While it is true that some tests are validated for use with children as young as age 24 months, the minimum age for a full psychological evaluation with our current psychology team is 7 years old. Tests administered will be based on each individual’s age, requirement and/or ability.

Certainly, adults can benefit from receiving a psychological evaluation to answer a range of questions they might have. Sometimes, people can have unevaluated learning or attention problems which may have held them back from excelling in different areas of their life. The results of a psychological assessment can help address such concerns and assist a person, and those around them, in understanding themselves to a greater degree.

A psychological assessment is not quite like taking a school exam that you pass or fail. Rather, psychological tests provide information for a psychologist to reach an accurate clinical impression and develop a recommended treatment plan that is tailored to the client’s needs. Having said that, we recommend you and/or your child are well-rested prior to the evaluation.

Psychological assessments are not one-size-fits all. There are individual differences so it takes time to understand each person’s needs and often different measures and assessment tools are necessary for this process. Psychologists are required to investigate a large number of potential factors, which include biological, psychological and social factors. To help with this, a multi-dimensional, multi-informant  assessment battery is used in order to accurately address the referral question, and to inform the clinical impressions and intervention recommendations. Having said that, we carefully select a range of tools that can help to answer your referral question and we will be gathering information from multiple sources e.g. family members or teachers to help us come to as accurate an assessment as possible. Each psychological test represents the “gold-standard” assessment protocol, complete with reliability, validity, sensitivity, and specificity statistics.

There are several steps for psychological assessment. For the first step, the client meets with a psychologist on our team for an hour “intake” consultation, and following the consultation a comprehensive set of screening questionnaires will be sent to client and third person observers (e.g., partner, family members, friends or teachers). 

For the second step, comprehensive evaluation including standardized assessments, clinical interviews as well as observation will be conducted across two visits or more across several days. Your psychologist will ready your  formal report over the following  8 weeks as there is an extensive drafting and proofing process.  

Lastly, a feedback session will be arranged to provide the opportunity for extensive discussion on your evaluation report and the findings.

The duration of assessment will depend on the questions posed. In general, you can expect:

  1. Psychological intake and screening to take around 2-3 hours;
  2. Full evaluation with standardized assessments and clinical interviews as well as feedback session take up to 15 hours.

After the detailed evaluation, your psychologist will provide you with a comprehensive report with evidence-based recommendations that should help you to manage your symptoms. We also offer psychotherapy, and parent-teacher consultation to help support you in accessing accommodations. For psychiatric services (medication or medical documentation), we can refer you to American Clinic Tokyo where our director (Dr. Andrew Kissane) holds a psychiatry clinic there.

TMH Shintomi Therapy office

Apologies but we do not have a designated parking lot for visitors at our Shintomi office in the Urbane Mitsui Building.

You may use the single-space metered street parking in front of the building, which is available from 9:00 to 19:00 for up to 60 minutes. The cost is 300 yen (100 yen coins only), except on Sundays, national holidays and New Year Holidays (Jan 1 – 3) when parking is free.

We cannot guarantee spaces will be available so we recommend using public transport to avoid being late/unable to attend appointments.

We charge the full amount for any sessions that are cancelled with less than 24 hours notice and for any appointments that are missed. To avoid late cancellation fees, please ensure to contact your provider in advance if you are unable to make an appointment.

An adult must attend, or wait in the reception area, with their child, especially for the first appointment. We ask that you limit waiting in the reception area to 1 person due to precautions against COVID-19 and to avoid disruption to other appointments. We aim to provide a safe environment for you and your child but we cannot guarantee safety if there are many people in the waiting area. We also kindly ask that you do not allow your children to jump or climb on furniture or touch equipment in the reception area as this may cause injury.

If your child is an adolescent, it may be possible for them to attend further appointments on their own, although, we recommend that you stay within 10 minutes walking distance of the office in case of an emergency, as we may need you to come to the office quickly. We kindly ask that you provide your contact information, including your phone number, to the counselor or psychologist. Please discuss this with your child’s counselor or psychologist during the first appointment. However, please bear in mind that if you fail to return to the office before the end of your child’s appointment, we may not be able  to continue offering services for your child unless you agree to remain in the waiting area for the entire duration of future appointments.

TMH Okinawa Mihama Therapy office

Apologies but no onsite parking is available at our office building, Hawk Town II. Please refrain from parking in resident’s spaces.

Please park at: Chatan Public Parking

(北谷町営駐車場; Chatan Choei Chushajo)

  • 4 mins walk to the office
  • Capacity: 1,500
  • Open 24 hours (parking gate closed between 6-8AM)
  • No parking fees

We ask for more than 24 hours notice for cancellations.

You will be charged for late cancellations and missed appointments.

  • Unfortunately, late appointment cancellation and non-attendance are not covered by TRICARE. Therefore, if you cancel an appointment within 24 hours of the appointment, or fail to attend it, TMH Okinawa will need to charge you for the appointment fee. This would be 22,000 to 25,000 yen depending on the therapist.

If you  cannot attend an appointment in-person, please consider keeping the appointment via telehealth.

  • To avoid late cancellation or non-attendance fees, please be sure to cancel any appointments more than 24 hours in advance, or to attend the appointment via telehealth from your own home.

You can attend in place of your child to avoid cancellation fees.

  • For occasions where children refuse to attend or take part in the appointment in person at our Mihama office or via telehealth, our therapist can usually work with one or both parents instead. Therefore, we advise you to keep such appointments and avoid cancellation fees.

You must remain in the Mihama office reception area while your child is being seen.

  • We need a parent, or responsible guardian, to remain at our office in the reception area for the duration of your child’s appointment.

If your child is an adolescent, and you cannot wait during an appointment, please discuss this with your child’s therapist.

  • After the first session, if your therapist agrees, and your child is more than 12, then you may be able to leave the office during your child’s appointment if the appointment is 60 minutes or longer. Please discuss this with your child’s therapist.
  • We need you to return to the office to collect your child before the appointment finishes. If you do not return before the end of the appointment, then we will not be able to see your child again for a further appointment unless you agree to remain in the Mihama office reception area for the duration of future appointments.

Though we aim to provide a safe environment for children at the Mihama Office, please do not allow your children to climb or jump on the furniture to prevent accidental injury

Other Questions

Throughout the pandemic, TMH has adopted a variety of procedures to allow us to keep offering services to those in need while doing the utmost to keep clients and staff safe from transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

We ask clients to only attend appointments if asymptomatic, to wash their hands on arrival at the offices,use alcohol to disinfect their hands and to wear masks. Please be prepared for staff to take your temperature when you arrive at the office.

We also would kindly like to ask clients to attend on their own, or only with one family member when someone needs to attend with them, such as accompanying a minor to the office, to avoid overcrowding in our reception area.

All of our consultation rooms allow our clients and staff members to keep a 2 metre distance in seating arrangements, and we keep rooms ventilated with extractor fans and with windows ajar. Our staff also take a variety of measures to prevent spread in the office, such as daily sanitising of contact surfaces.

Most importantly, we can offer almost all our services via telehealth with clients remaining in the comfort of their own home, and encourage clients to consider this option for some or all of their appointments. However, we will continue to offer face to face appointments for clients who prefer this option.