Online counseling is a fairly new way therapists and clients can communicate with one another. Over 4 billion people throughout the world have an internet connection, which is why it is not surprised that this form of communication can be implemented into the world of psychology. While online counseling has proven to be helpful to most, there has been many red flags raised when it comes to ethics. These problems include breach of confidentiality, boundary issues, and a lack of proper face to face communication between the therapist and client. Therapists must implement ways into their practice in order to prevent these situations from happening. Ethical code is significantly important in the psychology and must be taken seriously in order the proper diagnosis and treatment …show more content…
When it comes to online counseling, there tends to be a lack of gestures and visual cues to help the therapists better understand their client. This can be a challenge when it comes to the therapist being able to accurately make a full diagnosis and assessment on the client. When communicating over text messaging or the web, certain things the client says can be taken out of context, which leaves room for things to become lost in translation. There are important in-person cues, such as characteristics of speech, memory function, or physical evidence of a medical condition that can all be lost over online communication. This can greatly affect the online therapist's ability to develop the right treatment plan for their client (Childress 2000). Moreover, since there is no face to face contact; many have argued that it becomes harder to form a therapeutic relationship between the client and therapist. Since we cannot view facial expressions or hear how words are said, there can be a lack of core conditions of therapy, such as genuineness, empathy, and unconditional positive