Treatment process

Sign up

If you are interested in therapy at our university outpatient clinic, you may register with us. For a written registration, please use our contact form for data protection reasons. To register by telephone, please call during our telephone consultation hours:

Tuesday: 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. and

Wednesday:  4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

phone number +49 9131 85 67561 

You are also welcome to leave a message on the answering machine and we will call you back.

We focus on outpatient psychotherapy, which is carried out by psychological psychotherapists. If intensive psychiatric inpatient treatment is necessary (for example in the case of acute self-endangerment, acute psychotic symptoms, acute intoxication, or its physical/psychological consequences), you should present yourself to a specialist clinic, in Erlangen in one of the two following facilities:

Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Clinic of the University Hospital Erlangen
Schwabachanlage 6
91054 Erlangen
phone +49 9131 85 33 00 1

Klinikum am Europakanal
Clinic for Psychiatry, Addiction, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
Am Europakanal 71
91056 Erlangen
phone +49 9131 75 3 0

Psychotherapeutic consultation hours

The psychotherapeutic consultation hours ("Psychotherapeutische Sprechstunde") have been a prerequisite for the reimbursement of psychotherapy costs by the statutory health insurance since April 2017. You can attend this consultation with any resident psychotherapist registered with a health insurance company or any outpatient facility such as the university outpatient clinic. It takes place with one of our psychotherapists and serves as a clarification, whether a psychotherapeutic treatment is recommended by a professional. If you attend an appointment with us, this does not automatically mean that we can also admit you to treatment. However, the appointment is necessary if you want to start outpatient psychotherapy within one year at the expense of the health insurance company. Please bring your insurance card with you to the psychotherapeutic consultation.

Trial sessions

After the initial consultation, up to four further trial sessions ("probatorische Sitzungen") take place. They serve the purpose of getting to know each other, detailed diagnosis, and individual therapy planning. These trial sessions are important for both you and your psychotherapist in order to be able to decide whether a treatment in our university outpatient clinic is indicated.

Application for therapy

After the trial sessions, you can apply for either short-term or long-term psychotherapy with your health insurance company. The duration of therapy depends on the complexity of your symptoms and your therapy goals.

Psychotherapy phase

The actual psychotherapy begins after your health insurance approves the therapy. The typical setting for individual therapy sessions is a 50 minutes long appointment, once a week. Group therapy sessions, as well as a combination and intensification of individual with group therapy can also be useful. During your psychotherapy, we will regularly assess your therapy progress using questionnaires in order to adjust our therapeutic approach if necessary.

Final Phase

Throughout the course of psychotherapy, the skills you have learned will be applied to your everyday life. In order to promote your independence, the interval between therapy sessions is usually increased in the final phase. By means of a final, detailed diagnosis, we will review the success of the treatment together with you.

After psychotherapy

Even after therapy, we want to continue to provide you with the best possible support to ensure the long-term effectiveness of your treatment. To counteract the risk of recurring symptoms, we will use questionnaires to determine the stability of your treatment at regular intervals after the completion of your psychotherapy. In this context, booster sessions to refresh your therapy content can also take place.