"Double the market price?? What a bargain!"

Shrink Talk is great. It's funny, (ridiculously) well-written, down to earth, and updated like a motherfucker. The latest post mentions an article from the New York Times about superwealthy therapy patients and the psychologists who treat them--and how insane the money they make is. Or as he puts it, "What is this shrink saying for 45 minutes that could possibly be worth $600? 'Your mother is the sole cause of your neurosis. You have both my ethical and legal permission to kill her.'"

Since I just finished The Logic of Life, I took a stab at justifying why, if anything, those therapists make too little. I'm not Tyler Cowen, so see if this makes sense to you:

I don't think that saying that rich people are simply "more willing" to pay a lot for therapy really makes sense. The wealthy people mentioned in the article have high-level executive jobs, not trust funds--positions that require intelligence, creativity, business savvy. Based on that, you would think they would be more likely to negotiate a good deal on therapy, not less. Their goal, like anyone's, would be to get the best possible therapy at the lowest possible price. Let's say you want to open a practice aimed at very rich clients, so you call a prospective patient in to discuss terms. You say, naturally, that you would like a million dollars per session; the executive opens up the Yellow Pages to the "Counseling - Cognitive Therapy" section, filled with many, many competing psychologists, and offers five bucks for two hours, plus you wax his car. However, you counter by pointing out all the reasons he's even in your office in the first place--your shiny credentials, the convenient location, the word-of-mouth from the other rich clients you've had. That alone is enough to ensure the basic going rate for your services. But here's your trump card--because the client has such a well-paying job, his/her time is dramatically higher-priced than the average person. You are offering them the opportunity to rid themselves of a psychological condition that is almost certainly making them less productive--in overspending due to depression, lost productive time due to stress, lower quality of life--and thus, your services are worth the value of whatever money-making capacity you restore to them. The only reasons these therapists aren't making far, far more (I was surprised that they were getting as little as $600/session) is because of how hard it is to quantify how much time you gain when you are mentally healthy, much less put a price on a higher quality of life, not to mention that therapy is by no means a sure way to "cure" anything. If anything, it's a testament to the negotiating savvy of those clients.