What's CounsellingResource.com All About?

Welcome!

People visit our site for all kinds of reasons: you can learn about counselling and psychotherapy, look up books and articles in the bibliography or read book reviews, identify particular types of psychological distress, or find information about medications. You can also stay up to date with the latest news in psychology and mental health, or subscribe to our own RSS feeds or regular newsletter. Visitors to CounsellingResource.com are a pretty friendly and well-informed bunch, and many leave comments on articles posted in our blog and features section, or submit questions to the Ask the Psychologist service.

A large set of Site Tools provides extra technology that can help you get the most out of the site, and the submenu at the side of this page includes links to all our other main pages telling about the site, including details of our Privacy Policy, Accessibility, Advertising, and Terms of Use.

Who Are You?

Launched in 2002 by Dr Greg Mulhauser, by 2006 the site was beginning to grow beyond what one or two people could reasonably manage, and in 2007 we began the transition to a broader production team.

CounsellingResource.com is now the work of an international team of mental health professionals and web technology experts, including both volunteers and paid employees and consultants. Our International Advisory Board and 'consumer-facing' part of the team now includes the following.

International Advisory Board and Contributors

Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor

Dr Mulhauser leads the development of CounsellingResource.com and provides online counselling services, while also providing consulting services to corporate clients and to individual practitioners in the mental health professions. Dr Mulhauser is the Managing Director and largest shareholder of Mulhauser Consulting, Ltd., a company founded in 2002 to act as an umbrella organization for his activities after leaving his role as a corporate strategist and strategic relationship manager for one of Europe's largest communications firms. CounsellingResource.com as a whole is provided as a service of Mulhauser Consulting, Ltd.

Mulhauser is a British Marshall Scholar and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; a separate page provides additional information about the editor.

Dr Joseph M Carver, Consulting Clinical Psychologist

With a career as a psychologist spanning over three decades, Dr Carver's background includes work in psychiatric and medical hospitals, community mental health centres, private practice, and teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels. He oversees mental health services at a 330-bed maximum security correctional facility, provides expert witness testimony for a US government agency, and advises state governments. Having appeared on radio and in newspapers like The New York Times, Dr Carver is well known for his articles about 'losers' in relationships and about Stockholm Syndrome, as well as for his work on parenting, depression, PTSD, and other areas.

After contributing to CounsellingResource.com for more than a year, Dr Carver formally joined the site in 2007 as author of our popular Ask the Psychologist feature and is now a member of our International Advisory Board.

Professor Colin Feltham

Colin Feltham is Professor of Critical Counselling Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and of the Royal Society of Arts. His publications include What's Wrong With Us? The Anthropathology Thesis (Wiley, 2007), The Sage Handbook of Counselling & Psychotherapy (edited with Ian Horton, Sage, 2006), Brief Counselling (2nd edition, with Windy Dryden, Open University Press, 2005), Dictionary of Counselling (3rd edition, with Windy Dryden, Whurr, 2004), Controversies in Psychotherapy and Counselling (Sage, 1999), and Psychotherapy and its Discontents (edited with Windy Dryden, Open University Press, 1992). He has edited three book series for Sage and is a former editor of the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. He has given conference keynotes throughout the UK, Europe, Canada and Kenya.

Professor Feltham's abiding interest in the 'big questions' of the human condition has led him to question the origins of widespread human distress, the current environmental crisis and the prospects for humanity; his research focuses on how mental health is compromised laterally and continuously by the stresses of modern society and its institutions. Professor Feltham joined CounsellingResource.com in 2007 as a member of our International Advisory Board.

Dr Gareth Furber

A Clinical Psychologist, Dr Furber completed his PhD in 2006 in the area of psychological recovery following heart attack and has additional clinical training in cognitive-behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy and motivational interviewing. Based in Adelaide, Australia, Dr Furber is now involved in developing a clinical research program around relationship-based therapies for children and their caregivers as well as providing CBT interventions as part of the Flinders Medical Centre CAMHS liaison team.

Dr Furber maintains an ongoing review of resources for Clinical Psychologists, researchers and students at PsychSplash.com, and he has recently launched an online community for Psychology Bloggers. Dr Furber joined CounsellingResource.com in 2007 as a member of our International Advisory Board.

Sarah Luczaj, Blog Contributor

Sarah Luczaj is a person-centred counsellor, poet and translator from the UK. She has been living in rural Poland since 1997 with her husband and two daughters. She works as a therapist in a women's centre and has a private practice. Especially interested in focusing oriented therapy and Buddhism, she has published in this field (see Spirituality and Counselling, Experiential and theoretical perspectives, edited by C Purton and J Moore and published in 2006 by PCCS Books) and is now writing a PhD on the topic. Her website at www.sarah.luczaj.com is at present in Polish only!

Sarah joined the site in 2007 to add a new perspective to the main CounsellingResource.com blog, Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, and is now a member of our International Advisory Board.

Additional Contributors

Dr Paul Castell

A person-centred counsellor with the UK's National Health Service, Dr Castell also holds a PhD in Philosophy and recently brought these two aspects of his experience to bear in our book reviews section.

Sarah Hayes, Associate Counsellor

BACP-accredited counsellor Sarah Hayes has worked in mental health for over a decade, both privately and within the UK's National Health Service. Having worked with children as well as adults, individuals as well as couples, Sarah Hayes joined us in 2007 as Associate Counsellor providing online counselling services.

Her appointment as Associate Counsellor came as a direct response to unprecedented levels of demand for our online counselling service, and her availability via CounsellingResource.com helps us to maintain a high level of service without unduly long waiting times.

Authorship, Attribution and Citations

Most content on CounsellingResource.com is written by Dr Greg Mulhauser, except where clearly specified otherwise. Examples of content which will be clearly marked as not written by Dr Mulhauser include:

• The Ask the Psychologist feature, written by Dr Carver
• Blog posts in Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life marked as written by Sarah Luczaj rather than Dr Mulhauser
• Book reviews marked as written by one of several other contributors rather than Dr Mulhauser
• Discussion forum posts written by registered forum users
• Comments written on blog articles by blog readers
• Guest contributions from other authors, and material written or compiled by other researchers or other agencies

In all cases, clear attribution is provided indicating the original source of materials not produced by our in-house team of contributors described above. In addition, specific citations are provided for all substantive objective claims (often, via reference to an entry in our Research Bibliography).

All pages carry an indication of the date they were last reviewed and/or modified. On a few pages -- for example, the 'At a Glance' mental health news page -- the last reviewed date may not be as current as the most recent date of the news headline being displayed. In other words, our selection of news items provided by third parties is updated more frequently than it is explicitly reviewed. (Unlike some sites which use automatic re-blogging software to re-post other people's news items, you won't find us claiming to have 'professionally reviewed' auto-posted content!)

When citing material from this site, you may find it useful to refer to the APA style guide for electronic references. Alternatively, one common format for citing electronic references is given in the following example:

Mulhauser, Gregory R. (Year) 9 Observations About the Practice and Process of Online Therapy. Downloaded [insert date you downloaded the article] from http://counsellingresource.com/papers/online-practice/

If you are citing materials for an academic paper or journal article, you may of course be required to use the preferred citation format of the relevant institution.

Why Do You Exist?

The site is inspired by the idea that open access to information can help clients to make better informed choices and can help practitioners to provide a better service. Although some sites like to make a hard distinction between information for 'consumers' and information for 'professionals', we don't do that: we do our best to make sure that everything on this site will be comprehensible to both segments of the population.

The site also serves as 'home base' for the online counselling and online therapy practice -- although this is not by any means the site's primary purpose. That primary purpose is, and will remain, to provide free access to information and resources in mental health, counselling and psychotherapy.

You can read on a separate page about the Editorial Biases which influence the way the site develops and grows.

How Can I Advertise on the Site?

The advertising you see through some areas of the site helps offset the costs of hosting it, developing it, and -- most importantly -- keeping it free for the thousands of visitors who come here every day. We primarily rely on context-driven advertising, whereby advertisements are automatically selected by a third party on the basis of the content on a page. This helps ensure that what is published on this site cannot be directly influenced by any advertiser: we do not know in advance who those advertisers might be, or what editorial influence they might like to exert if they had any. Fortunately, they don't. More details are available on our Advertising Policy page.

We also occasionally work directly with individual advertisers. If you'd like more exposure for your website or private practice, advertising directly on our site -- where your target audience is probably already looking -- can be one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching people who will value what you have to offer. Just check the Targeted Advertising page for more details on our front page featured sponsors and other ways of reaching your audience.

About Gender Language and Spelling

In an attempt to remain gender neutral without introducing too many politically correct linguistic contortions, this site frequently adopts a grammatically incorrect device: many non-specific references employ third-person plural pronouns and possessives (they, them, their) rather than the strictly correct first person alternatives (he, him, his, she, her, hers).

The word 'counselling' appears throughout with the spelling used in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The US spelling 'counseling' also appears where appropriate, such as in the bibliography or elsewhere that specific book or article titles from US authors are mentioned. US-based authors, including Dr Carver, also use US spelling and punctuation.

Although the Managing Editor is geographically based in the United Kingdom, we make every effort to provide information that is broadly relevant across the world.

Behind the Scenes

This site is served by Apache and hosted on a dual Opteron server running security hardened Linux.

Registered Office

CounsellingResource.com is a service of Mulhauser Consulting, Ltd., a company registered in England no. 4455464. Registered office: 55 De Tracey Park, Newton Abbot TQ13 9QT.

Silly advertisements for other sites' viral marketing efforts that we used to think were really cool before we knew any better: