Do you wonder what precisely is the difference between counselling and psychotherapy?

This is understandable since the terms counselling and psychotherapy are so often used interchangeably. However, it is necessary to know the difference in order to make an informed choice about which may best serve your needs at any given time.

Counselling tends to be more issue based, some examples of this are bereavement counselling, crisis pregnancy counselling, relationship counselling, and addiction counselling. While this is only a sample list of the range of counselling that is available, it serves to illustrate the nature of an issue based service. Counselling training varies in that some training only deals with a particular issue, and others are more broad based. So if you are thinking of engaging the services of a counsellor it is useful to know the scope of their expertise to help you make an informed choice before you start.

Where this can become a little more complicated is when your need for support needs to cover more than one clearcut issue. If, for example, you need support to deal with a recent bereavement and you engage a bereavement counsellor that would seem at face value a reasonable decision. But if, for example, you also have longer term issues with addiction (or a range of other issues), it is reasonable that the bereavement may affect your addiction and vice versa - that your addictive behaviour will be effected by the impact of the bereavement on you. In this situation it is worth seeking support from someone who has the expertise to deal with the full range of issues that may become involved before you begin.

Psychotherapy would include the skills of a counsellor but would go farther. A skilled psychotherapist ought to be able to deal with your current issue and be able to support you to see any patterns and links to other issues with view to supporting you to take responsibility for evaluating if any changes are required - although change per se is not necessarily the focus. Each person will be different in what is an appropriate course of action for them.

So while counselling and psychotherapy are often used interchangeably the difference is that a person trained as a counsellor is not equipped to provide psychotherapy unless they are also trained in psychotherapy. On the other hand a person trained as a psychotherapist is equipped to provide counselling unless they specifically do not provide this service. Hence the importance of speaking with the counsellor or psychotherapist whose services you are thinking of engaging before you make your final choice. Most of us need to be clear on the facts before we can make a fully informed choice.

The reason the points raised in this article are necessary is because there is no current statutory regulation in Ireland for counselling and psychotherapy, notwithstanding the fact that there are many well qualified and reputable people at work in a variety of settings. Dan Neville TD has been persistent in calling for change on this issue. 'Call to regulate counsellors' is an informative article on the topic.

More recently on Saturday, September 17th 2011 in Dublin City University, Dan Neville, who is President of the Irish Association of Suicidology and Fine Gael TD for Limerick, called again for statutory regulations to be introduced for the registration of psychotherapists and counsellors. He said "A full system of regulation and statutory registration is urgently needed if we want to prevent vulnerable people in crisis being damaged by maverick counsellors and psychotherapists who are not properly trained or qualified. We need to ensure good clinical governance and high standards of patient care."

In the meantime we still need to get the supoort we need as and when we need it. This necessarily involves shopping around and asking as many questions as necessary to be able to make an informed choice about who is the right person to offer that support.

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