During your placement, it’s likely that you’ll face an ethical dilemma. Learning how to respond to these ethical issues under pressure will be an essential skill for improving your counselling practice and ensuring you’re doing what is right for your client and the safety of others:

• Ethical problem solving – set yourself up to be prepared to deal with these problems when they arise.
• Some possible ethical issues in counselling:
  • Maybe you and the client have a mutual friend/acquaintance.
  • They may disclose self-harm or plans to harm another.
  • The client might show up to a session under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
• Look at your contract – if one of these scenarios is covered in your contract, then the rules of engagement have already been laid out.
• Ethical framework – To know how best to deal with ethical issues you might encounter in your counselling practice, understand your ethical framework and what it asks of you.
• Work out whose problem it is. Yours? The client’s? Both of yours?
• What are you going to do next?
• What does the law say?
• Having these conversations with a client can be tricky – but not having them could have greater consequences.
• Immediately write down any ethical issue or dilemma you encounter and what you did or didn’t do.
• Defensible decision-making.
• Respect the clients’ autonomy, but weigh that up against the stakes.
• You may need to break confidentiality, and this will most likely negatively impact the therapeutic relationship.
• Think of the greater good.