I've been in and out of therapy for most of my life, and I've always been under the assumption that therapy sessions are pretty much all confidential, bound by HIPAA, except for in a few circumstances like preventing harm to the client or others.

One of my family members is a family therapist and over the holidays she was sharing stories from her and her colleagues' clients. I was kind of put off by this but didn't want to start anything. None of the information made the clients identifiable, so I thought maybe this was the loophole but that still doesn't sound right to me. Is this normal?

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of switching back to a dumb phone. I haven’t dug too far into the search because every time I do, I get hung up on the apps I need for work - outlook, my work keycard app, etc. Is there any good way to work around this? Keep my current phone with only those apps for work, operating on WiFi, and switch my primary phone? If anyone has examples of things they’ve tried and what’s worked, that would be great. TIA!