Therapists: Learn About the Practice and Process of Online Therapy
Practitioners interested in the practice and process of online therapy can find a new paper on the topic available in our section dedicated to online training and development resources. Drawing on an evidence base of over 700,000 words of online counselling and therapy, the paper highlights several simple observations which, surprisingly, have not yet received significant exploration in the academic literature.
From the abstract of the new paper 9 Observations About the Practice and Process of Online Therapy:
The underlying therapeutic process of online counselling via email displays novel qualities in terms of its dimensionality, the role played by empathy and momentum, the significance of memory and sensory modalities, and the influence exerted by self selection bias. Asynchronous online counselling also introduces novelties to the basic mechanics of daily work, including a need for awareness of the practice peak to mean ratio, some subtleties regarding client consent for research, challenges for handling client backlogs, and a problem of representing counsellor experience honestly. Despite all this novelty, however, it seems that no fundamentally new ethical territory has been created by the advent of online counselling; there is, rather, merely new technological territory which challenges us to grasp its ramifications for existing normative principles.
Keywords: Email, ethics, online counselling, online therapy, therapeutic process
The paper is available both as a multi-part HTML document, and as a single PDF, specially formatted for ease of on-screen reading.
Other articles by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor
This article was last reviewed by on Tuesday, 20th December 2005.
The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2005/12/20/online-practice-paper/
