Cybercounseling from the perspective of cybercounselors :|opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the web has gradually become a media for reaching mental health services. Counselees demand counseling services through the internet and cybercounselors started to supply those services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the opportunities and challenges of cybercounseling in terms of how cybercounselors experience them. Participants of the study were seven cybercounselors purposively selected and who pursue their practice in Turkey. For data collection, a semi-structured interview protocol was developed and implemented by the researcher. As a result of the thematic qualitative analysis, in-depth knowledge on the cybercounselors practices was reached. One of the major findings of the study is that there are opportunities for both counselors and counselees such as convenience, receiving counseling in one’s mother tongue, and saving time. Cybercounseling also has some challenges such as technological insufficiencies and incompatibility for certain techniques and cases. However, the study revealed that counselors found strategies, such as developing a new perspective for counseling and establishing new rules to ensure ethical conduct, in order to overcome those challenges. There are some limitations in the study resulting from the nature of qualitative research sampling. The results are not generalizable; however in-depth understanding was achieved. The study has implications for cybercounselors, counseling educators, and policy-makers.