I love Twitter, even with Elmo Fascista having taken over, it’s like taking a small city of the best people that exist ever in my pocket. I think I’ve counted at least 1,000 active/daily regular users who interact with my feed.
A thousand!
The power of social media never stops astonishing me, and I knew it would be powerful all those years ago in my teens using MySpace.
MySpace is actually where I found my first online clients. At the time, I was a student counsellor, I was in training, and while I completed the practical component of my professional diploma, I thought about how therapy would be accessible to anyone one day through the internet. So I offered free counselling to folks who knew I was a student in training. One of my clients I went on to see for 6 years. They lived in America and was very isolated in a rural place and in a state that had few psychological services for folks. I knew the internet was the only place they would ever be able to receive help. So we started with text, and emails, then moved to Skype later.
I ended up having clients from all over the world, and most didn’t care that I was a student, or that I wasn’t located in their area, only that they felt supported and helped. I spent a great deal of time ensuring they felt the therapeutic process I provided was helpful. I looked at cultural differences a lot too, and adjusted my approach to accomodate that best I could. And I had two supervisors on the go back then to ensure I was adhering to practice requirements.
I graduated and entered my psych degree and started to charge a sliding scale fee of $30aud to $50aud. There were so many people for whom the cost of counselling was prohibitive, but mostly, they just didn’t have services where they were located. And that seemed wrong to me. Everyone deserves emotional and psychological support. I only ever worked with mild to moderate problems, but even then, it left me wondering what the people with serious issues did. There was so much stigma, and still is, and I think that stigma has lessened overtime but I’ve never agreed that we shouldn’t provide a counselling support service through the internet simply because of the insecure nature of the internet.
Practitioners should take care to keep information confidential and to not disclose who is in therapy with you. But also, I don’t think anyone should be denied counselling as long as that practitioner is practicing within their capacity, has supervision, has OPD. Etc.
I would like to see the ACA become a proper licensing body, and have counsellors and social workers registered with AHPRA. We have a huge potential for so many more available counsellors to be providing Medicare supported services to folks who don’t need intensive therapy. Who just need to access that unconditional positive framework, the Rogerian approach, that therapists provide. And the fact we don’t, the fact it’s often cost prohibitive for those who need it the most, really worries me, and it makes me question the goal of our government in terms of ensuring services are available to people in an affordable and timely manner. Especially to take the burden off acute services who are unnecessarily weighed down by cases that might never have presented to acute care teams if they’d only had the proper, long term access to someone they could talk to, and felt guided by.
anyway, thanks for listening to my rant, and thanks for all the coffees!
—Kylie