This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Utah legislators this session took aim at life coaches who harm their clients’ mental health, but the law that the governor signed Wednesday stops short of prescribing minimum standards or ethical guidelines for the burgeoning profession.
Anyone can call themselves a life coach, which, unlike being a mental health therapist, does not require any kind of education, training or license.
In Utah, one state agency found that dozens of life coaches are advertising their ability to treat mental health issues even though the vast majority are not trained or permitted to work as therapists. State licensors say they field an average of one complaint each month about life coaches.
The new law strengthens existing regulations that forbid anyone who isn’t a licensed therapist from treating mental health conditions. By clearly defining what only therapists are allowed to do, licensors can more readily cite and fine life coaches who treat mental health, according to state Sen. Mike McKell, the bill’s sponsor.
But the new law does not designate any money to immediately hire more investigators to probe potential problems.
An investigation last year by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica showed that about a third of the 43 Utah therapists whose licenses had been revoked or denied since 2010, or who allowed their suspended licenses to expire, appear to have continued to work in the mental health field. Some rebranded as “life coaches.”
McKell said the new law targets life coaches who had lost their therapist licenses because the state deemed them unsafe to work with patients.
Utahns have struggled to get mental health help, largely due to a shortage of available therapists, according to a recent report from the Utah Behavioral Health Coalition.
In that gap, life coaching has emerged as an unregulated alternative, according to the Utah Office of Professional Licensure Review. At the request of lawmakers, the state office studied life coaching and whether it should be licensed, and found that Utah life coaches advertise using more than 100 titles, including “executive coach,” “relationship specialist” and “soul-sourced consultant,” according to a November 2024 report.
State researchers looked at online advertisements for roughly 220 Utah life coaches and concluded that about 40% may be offering therapy. These coaches say they specialize in addressing mental health struggles, the state found, with some claiming the ability to “conquer” their client’s mental health conditions.
As part of the review, the state office also surveyed Utah’s therapists in an effort to better understand potential risks associated with life coaches. Of the more than 3,500 who responded, a third said they have had at least one client tell them that they were harmed by a life coach.
The state report quoted one unnamed therapist who described treating patients who had hired life coaches: “All 5 reported life coaches had them ‘deep dive’ into their trauma, which sent them into an emotional spiral and then did not provide them with any skills to cope with the emotional distress. 4 of them ended up being hospitalized with severe suicidal ideation.”
Sarah Stroup, a licensed therapist who is on the legislative committee for the Utah Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, said the new law is a starting point “in ensuring that Utahns are receiving ethical care.”
“Our goal from the beginning was to advocate for guardrails to be put in place so that life coaches weren’t providing mental health treatment,” she said, “and therapists who had lost their license couldn’t continue practicing under the guise of life coaching.”
A High-Profile Case of Abuse
Mental health professionals and some lawmakers have pushed for more stringent oversight of life coaches in Utah in the wake of the high-profile 2023 conviction of Jodi Hildebrandt, who is in prison for abusing the children of her life coaching business partner.
Hildebrandt was a licensed clinical mental health counselor, but she had removed references to being a therapist from her website and instead marketed herself as a life coach in the years prior to her conviction. One of her former clients previously told The Tribune and ProPublica that Hildebrandt had said she became a life coach as a way to get around the ethical rules therapists are required to follow. (Hildebrandt’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)
Kevin Franke, the father of the children abused by Hildebrandt and his ex-wife, has advocated for more oversight of life coaches since the two women were sent to prison. He said he thinks there should be a state registry where the public can see whether a life coach has had complaints made against them or whether they were ever disciplined, and he hopes the state will eventually mandate standards for life coaches, including a code of ethics.
Credit:
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
“I’m particularly concerned with life coaches who effectively impersonate a therapist or present themselves as some cheaper alternative to a licensed mental health professional,” he said.
While Utah legislators last year floated the idea of requiring life coaches to be licensed— something no other state in the country has done — the new law does not take that step. Utah’s Office of Professional Licensure Review found that licensing life coaches would be challenging given the wide-ranging services they offer and the ambiguity of the titles they use.
The new law, however, clarifies that only licensed therapists can present themselves as having the skills, experience and training to address mental illness and “emotional disorders.”
McKell, the Republican who sponsored the legislation, said that by better defining in state law what a therapist can do, he hopes that licensors can more easily penalize life coaches who harm their clients.
“Instead of trying to create regulation for life coaching, I am drawing this fence around mental health and what mental health professionals do at the exclusion of everyone else,” McKell said.
But some have questioned how effective the new law can be, given the small amount of money that is likely to be allocated to the effort.
The law creates an enforcement fund that will be collected from fines that the state’s licensing division issues to anyone who practices mental health therapy without a license. McKell said the fund signals to licensors that the Legislature wants them to take this issue seriously.
But previous reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica shows these types of citations are rare and unlikely to generate significant revenue: Over the last decade, the licensing department has cited just 25 people for “unauthorized practice” in the mental health field, according to a review of citations and other records. Those citations amounted to just over $10,000.
And last year, while licensors cited nearly 1,000 people, not a single new citation was given to anyone identified as working in the mental health field, according to a review of citations published monthly.
Melanie Hall, spokesperson for the Division of Professional Licensing, acknowledged that the law does not guarantee an influx of resources but said even a small amount of money could help fund social media campaigns to encourage the public to report bad behavior. If the fund grows larger, she said, that money could be used to conduct more investigations or pay for experts to weigh in on complex cases with high public harm.
At the same time, some Utah life coaches say the bill has already gone too far and could restrict their ability to help clients.
Heather Frazier, who advertises her expertise as a “parent-teen connection life coach,” said in a public hearing that restricting the treatment of “interpersonal dysfunction” to just therapists risks putting life coaches out of business. Life coaches can help struggling clients who don’t have a diagnosed mental illness learn how to better communicate with family members, she said.
“Without coaching, they will have to go to a therapist, which is already an overburdened, overworked part of our state,” Frazier said.
