Psychologists - Peoria, IL

"Before getting started, let me be perfectly clear: this review is solely an account of my personal experience with michael shear and Resolutions Unlimited. I can’t speak to the quality of service michael has provided to any other clients over the years. He has several positive reviews, so clearly some people have gotten value out of their time with michael. Which is honestly a good thing, because the thought of him treating other patients struggling with mental health the way he treated me is deeply upsetting. I don’t typically take the time to write reviews like this, but I feel like it’s the only ethical choice I have after the needless stress michael shear put me through. I certainly wish I had known in advance how he conducts himself before ever getting involved. I’ve seen roughly a dozen different therapists so far throughout my life. Michael shear—through his actions towards me over a year after our therapy sessions concluded—has easily been the worst. Here’s a timeline of what happened. Mid-2020 After googling “Buddhist therapists near me,” only one name came up—michael’s. As someone who has found many helpful mental health techniques through Buddhist practice and teachings, I was excited to find a therapist who would be working from a similar philosophical framework. But upon seeing his hourly rate ($175), I knew I couldn’t afford him. I opted to see his other employee—Aimee Royer—instead. This turned out to be an excellent decision because Aimee was, and still is, the best therapist I’ve ever had (while costing less than half of michael’s rate). Still, I wondered what sort of treatment I was missing out on from michael—a Buddhist practitioner with so many decades of experience and, assumedly, wisdom. Due to COVID, my insurance provider (Blue Cross Blue Shield) implemented a program where 100% of your bill would be covered for any and all telehealth services. I called my insurance company twice to verify this information, which they did [this is important later]. I knew this was realistically the only chance I’d ever have to afford treatment from michael, and I was excited by the opportunity. I saw him multiple times over the course of two to three months. Fast forward to the end of all our sessions. I didn’t get much out of them—partially because his style wasn’t effective for me (this is more of a personal preference—i’m sure michael has been plenty effective with other patients )—and partially because a lot of our session time was spent talking about his life, his interests, and his stories. Don’t get me wrong—they were all fascinating and I was happy to oblige the conversations once I realized his therapy methods weren’t helping me, but ideally a professional charging $175 an hour would be diligent about making sure their client gets their money’s worth. But no matter—this was all covered by my insurance anyway. Right? (Right.) Late-2020 After my sessions with michael concluded, he texted me saying I owed him $1,500. My insurance claim was apparently rejected. I knew this was a mistake, but his office didn’t offer any help —it was solely up to me to look into unless I wanted to be on the hook for sessions I both couldn’t afford and didn’t get much out of. So after a lengthy and stressful phone call to my insurance company, I was assured by Blue Cross Blue Shield that the claim had been submitted incorrectly and that if it were resubmitted properly, everything would be covered. As far as I knew, the claim was properly resubmitted and taken care of. I figured that was the last of it. Turns out that was naïve thinking. Mid-2021 I go through one of the worst traumas a human being can experience. I won’t elaborate because 1) it’s too painful to talk about and 2) because the details of what happened aren’t relevant to the story. This is just to provide context for the mental state I’ve been in the past year. I’m suffering from some of the most intense emotional agony a human being can feel, which made the next sequence of events even harder on me. January 2022 My then fiancée wanted to start therapy, so I recommended the aforementioned Aimee Royer. She wanted to go in person, so I drove her to Aimee’s office at Resolutions Unlimited. While my fiancée was in session, I stepped into the hall to take a phone call. As I’m literally mid sentence, michael—whom i hadn’t seen or spoken with in over a year—walks up and immediately interrupts me. “What’s your name?” I told him my name. “You still have an unpaid bill.” I told him I didn’t and he walked off as I returned to my phone call. When I went back into the office, I told Amy (the receptionist–not Aimee the therapist) that this was a mistake and I would not be paying this new $608.44 bill they just dumped on me. Apparently Resolutions Unlimited split the bill in half when submitting it in 2020, so my insurance processed one claim as a duplicate and rejected it. Amy said the bill from the rejected claim had “fallen through the cracks” when they upgraded some software a while back, which is why it took them over a year to tell me about it. I told her this was an insurance issue and that they needed to get their money from them. Even though that was a factual statement, she still threatened me with collections before I even walked out the door. The next four months were filled with stress and anxiety as Resolutions Unlimited resubmitted my claim again and again it was rejected. Naturally, since michael’s proclivity was to assume I was a liar who was trying to defraud him, he never offered to help me figure out the discrepancy. Nor did his office offer to call my insurance company, which could have solved this whole thing in a matter of minutes. So I called my insurer yet again. According to the agent, BCBS rejected michael’s claim because it wasn’t coded for telehealth. The agent told me if I ever need to check for myself, telehealth codes always start with a 2. And the itemized bill Resolutions Unlimited sent me in the mail did not, in fact, have a 2 in front of the billing code. Miachael agreed to resubmit the claim one more time… but if it got rejected too, he’d go straight to collections because, as he put it, “we’re not gonna mess around.” Unsurprisingly, the next claim was also rejected. No reason was given, so I can’t say with certainty that the mistake was on Resolutions Unlimited’s end. However, Resolutions Unlimited sent me yet another copy of the itemized bill, and—surprise, surprise—the bill was still missing the required telehealth code (as you can see in the attached image). They also used that same bill to lob another threat of sending debt collectors after me if I didn’t arrange a payment plan within the next 30 days. So I once again contacted my insurance agency. I explained the situation and the problems I had getting this claim approved. The agent believed me (unlike Resolutions Unlimited), looked into the issue, and reprocessed the claim himself. That’s all it took to fix! When I found out from BCBS that the claim was finalized, I called Resolutions Unlimited the next day to once more tell them insurance was covering my bill and they were making a mistake by sending me to collections. I called a few times over the course of the day in an effort to get ahold of someone. I kept getting the machine, so I kept calling back. Eventually I just left a message. Later that day, michael calls back. He’s seething from the second I answer and starts by sarcastically thanking me for calling and hanging up on him repeatedly throughout the day (he once again assumed the worst about me and thought I was intentionally crank calling). But I wanted to get the conversation over with as quickly as possible (he was a deeply unpleasant person to talk to that day), so I moved on to the only reason I called. I told him I was calling about the bill, and that my insurance provider had just informed me they’ve finalized the claim. He angrily cut me off once he heard me reference the money, saying “Yes, we’re going to pursue it [collections]! You had the fuckin’ services, man!” I told him he must not have listened to my message, because in it I explained how my insurance had finalized everything and his money was on the way. I ended up having to email michael a screenshot of my conversation with the insurance agent to prove this since I was still being treated as a liar. I did receive a phone call from michael a couple days later apologizing for flying off the handle at me about the calls—turns out their phone system wasn’t routing properly that day, so whenever he’d pick up it would divert my line to the answering machine instead. Michael apologized for that, but only because he found out his underlying assumption about me doing it intentionally had been incorrect. Had I actually been a mentally ill patient calling and hanging up on purpose, no doubt michael would have seen zero problems with how disrespectful and nasty he was towards me. (As a reminder, michael teaches rational emotive behavior therapy.) I have not received any sort of apology on behalf of michael or Resolutions Unlimited in regards to michael’s angry cursing, the incompetence that led to my claim being rejected again and again, or the months they spent hanging debt collectors over my head for a bill from 2020 that michael would have never even remembered had he not physically seen me that day I took my fiancée to Aimee. tl;dr While my mental health was already at the lowest of the lows, michael: - rudely interrupted me on the phone after having not seen him in over a year to tell me I had an unpaid bill - let the bill go unpaid for over a year without ever notifying me in the first place - never offered to get personally involved in contacting my insurance company to get the issue straightened out - repeatedly threatened me with collections over the course of several months - falsely accused me of crank calling him - angrily swore at me over the phone by saying “You had the fuckin’ services, man!” as he once again implied I was a liar trying to swindle him out of his big-time therapist money - has only apologized for the crank call accusation and nothing else Dr. Michael S. Shear of Resolutions Unlimited gave me an inordinate amount of anxiety and stress during the absolute lowest point in my life. But my mental health be damned, because in the end michael got the only thing he cared about—his precious $608.44 check."