Therapy and Counselling: Types, Process, Online Therapy and More

All About Counselling and Psychotherapy

This section of CounsellingResource.com addresses the why, the how, the what, the who, and more of counselling and psychotherapy. You can learn about the benefits of therapy, consider questions to ask when selecting a counsellor or therapist, find out about supervision in mental health practice and why it means something a little different than you might think, and read what the US government has to say about self help, paying for services, and more.

Types of Therapy

Here you can learn about many of the most popular types of counselling and psychotherapy, with in-depth articles available on a few of them (with the latter including cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, person-centred therapy, and existential approaches). You can learn about the history of the field and about research on therapeutic effectiveness and efficacy, while a general mental health glossary and a glossary of terms used in children's mental health provide brief capsules for dozens of terms. You can also read what the US government has to say about both 'traditional' and 'alternative' approaches to mental health services.

Online Therapy

A Google search reveals literally millions of pages out there about online therapy. Unfortunately, a truly vast quantity of this information has been provided by people who have done very little, if any, actual therapy online. Although many trained mental health professionals are very interested in online therapy -- and eager to provide it -- if you ask them directly, those who are willing to engage in the conversation will often concede to you that in fact, they haven't worked with real clients in an online setting.

By contrast, our information about online therapy is written from the perspective of someone who actually does it -- quite a bit of it, in fact. I've been offering my own online service since not long after this site was created, and as far as I'm aware, I was the first online practitioner to document the completion of over 1 million words of fully peer-supervised, individual online therapy via email. So unlike some of the site owners in this field, I do not claim to be an 'expert' in the area -- I'm pretty sure I'm not -- but at least I've been doing it.

...And in Other Sections

Last but not least, for practitioners who are interested in working online, a separate section of the site provides training and development resources, including an in-depth paper about the practice and process of online therapy.