Harmony Place San Jose — Counselor in San Jose, CA

I was not aware that a mental health treatment center could cause as much damage to my emotional and physical well-being as Harmony Place. This program is a newly launched satellite office of the main Harmony Place in Monterey, which is run by more experienced professionals. The lack of professionalism and shirking of the duty of care by administrative and clinical staff frankly borders on the inhumane. Admissions director Jessica is a huge part of the problem. She persuaded me to leave my apartment in Newport Beach at 3 days notice to join the program. 2 weeks later she threatened to discharge me in the middle of the night after I pointed out that the AC in the housing they provided was broken and needed immediate repair for the sake of health & safety. It took her a week to organize repairs during a summer heat wave, and even then she did not send professionals. She sent her husband, who has no HVAC experience and watched YouTube instructional videos, to no avail. The therapeutic team is the most inexperienced, unprofessional group of providers I have come across. With very rare exception (Mario and Gina fulfilled their duty of care, in my opinion), the treatment team was insensitive to the PTSD I was going through and their behavior only created more trauma for me. Bad therapy is proven to be worse than no therapy, and while Mario and Gina did their best, the group sessions did not consist of therapy, just extremely open-ended discussion between group members. Therapists did not guide the discussion into anything productive, they just asked vague questions and repeated your words back to you. One member of my cohort approached me in tears one night expressing similar disappointment at the lack of any therapeutic rigor or effective psychoeducation that characterizes even the most rudimentary of treatment programs. I encouraged her to stick it out, albeit sharing that I had similar concerns; had never before experienced such an ineffectual form of group therapy. Despite this, I retained faith in the program’s good intentions and stabilizing potential. Therapist Sean was assigned to me for individual sessions. I have worked with countless therapists over the course of my adult life, and I can say definitively that he is the most irresponsible and insensitive provider I have ever come across. He is a white cis male who professed that he was neurodivergent/on the autism spectrum, but this went far beyond an issue of neurodivergence. His inability to fulfill a basic duty of care, and the hostility he expressed towards me (which included invalidation of my experience as a female person of color and the traumas therein) ended up creating more trauma than I came into the program with. I was discharged without warning one day — two weeks into my care — in order to make room for a client whose insurance could be billed at a rate more profitable than mine. Coming to this treatment center will result in an experience of exploitation and development of acute trauma. I don’t say this with malice towards the program; I felt it was my responsibility to warn others that Harmony Place preys upon a vulnerable population seeking only to better themselves through a substance use/mental health program that is essentially a scam. My experience shows their capacity to reel you in, traumatize you further, and then discard you without even having the decency of facilitating transfer or referral to a better treatment center -- which even the most basic of treatment programs are obligated to do for you upon discharge. Again, I can’t speak to the Harmony Place in Monterey, but this was my honest experience of the San Jose program. Good luck in finding the therapeutic resources that best serve you, and that you unequivocally deserve. You won’t find it at Harmony Place San Jose.

Harmony Place will change your life.