9 Observations About the Practice and Process of Online Therapy

By Dr Greg Mulhauser
avatar image

Drawing on an evidence base of over 700,000 words of email-based counselling and therapy, this exploration highlights 9 simple observations about the practice and process of online therapy. This paper is available here as a series of brief HTML sections, or separately as a single PDF download.

Mulhauser, Gregory R. (2005) 9 Observations About the Practice and Process of Online Therapy. Downloaded from http://counsellingresource.com/papers/online-practice/

Article Contents

Abstract

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

Continue to the introduction and background...

This page was last reviewed by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Tuesday, 22 April 2008.

The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/papers/online-practice/index.html