Mental health articles

Consultation is a complex competency that overlaps with all the other aspects of mental health practice: management, supervision, therapy, assessment, diversity/relationship,
research/basic science. The development of consultation skills involves integrating these various specialty areas. However, one must keep in mind important differences in how these areas of competency are applied in consultation:
• Management: A manager is directly responsible for the work of subordinates. A consultant is not directly responsible for the work results, but works indirectly through others.
• Supervision: A supervisor exercises authority over the supervisee and holds evaluation power. Consultants typically have a peer relationship with the client— though the client pays the consultant for his or her time, the relationship is ideally one of colleagues mutually working to solve a problem.
• Therapy: In psychotherapy, the clinician helps clients directly. In consultation, clients are helped indirectly, through the medium of the consultee. The consultant is not contracted to do therapy, although therapeutic skills are important in the
consulting relationship. Consultants may also find themselves doing “ therapy” for the organization as a whole through systems intervention.
• Assessment: When performing psychological assessments, the clinician must often make diagnoses based on limited information, usually provided only by the individual being assessed and any empirical data in the individual’s record. In consultation,
it becomes much more crucial to assess the broader influences on a complex system of many interacting variables. This usually involves gathering data from a variety of sources through interviews, questionnaires, and other techniques.
• Diversity/relationship: Diversity issues, neglected in the mental health field until recently, are becoming increasingly recognized as crucial to efficacious therapeutic interventions. These are also important considerations for consultants. Consulting
builds on this competency in designing accurate assessments and effective
interventions that consider diversity issues within an organization.
• Research/basic science: Research skills and the basic ideas of the scientific method are important for the clinician to understand in order to develop and use the most effective assessment and intervention tools. Likewise, these skills are
important to accurately assess and intervene in an organization without being
swayed by potential biases. However, these skills constitute only a subset of the background knowledge needed for effective consultation.

Tags: consultation