Mental health articles

Consultation generally involves three parties: the consultant, the consultee, and the client. The consultee is the individual with whom the consultant works directly. The client is the individual or group with whom the consultee works. For consultation in clinical settings, the consultee may be a mental health provider who has little experience
with a particular type of client. The consultant is called in to discuss the client’s unique case factors with the consultee. In an organizational setting, a company (the client) may hire a consultant to work with the CEO (the consultee) to enhance that person’s managerial style.
The consultant, consultee, and client system are involved in a problem-solving process that includes relationship development, data gathering, problem identification, goal setting, strategy selection and implementation, evaluation, and often a recycling of the process. This sequence is not necessarily linear (e.g., evaluation of how things
are going can occur at any point during the course of consultation).
Caplan, the founder of mental health consultation, originally restricted consultation to two professionals and their agreed-on work and firmly believed that therapy should never occur in a consulting relationship. This stance is generally accepted, but most mental health consultants would likely agree that the boundary between therapy and consultation is sometimes blurred and that it is difficult to avoid therapeutic issues when working closely with a consultee. However, it must be stressed that consearsultation is not the same as psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, the therapist works with
the client’s personal issues. In consultation, the consultant works with the consultee to enhance the consultee’s effectiveness in a job situation or some other specific capacity.
Although in practice, this distinction has many shades of gray, the consultant
should refer the consultee to another mental health provider should it become apparent that psychotherapy is indicated.
The goal of consultation is to improve the consultee or client system in some way.
Helping the consultee with the client system enhances the consultee’s knowledge, skills, and attitudes, leading to improved handling of the client system. Another definition of consultation is tailored specifically to the field of human service.Dougherty  characterized consultation as a process in
which a human services professional assists a consultee with a specific work-related or caretaking-related problem within a client system. This process helps both the consultee and the client system.

Unlike clinical, counseling, school, and industrial /organizational psychology, consulting psychology has only recently become a formally recognized area of training.
Many mental health provider educational programs provide only some basic coursework, and quite a few programs do not offer any explicit consultation training. Because there is a growing interest in the field, many programs are now offering special tracks in consulting,
sometimes in collaboration with business schools. Still, at the present time, no specific credentials or licenses are necessary to do consulting work. Only in the last few years has there been postdoctoral recognition of consultation expertise, such as the
American Board of Professional Psychology’s Diplomate in Consulting Psychology, which was first offered in 2003. The Society of Consulting Psychology, Division 13 of the American Psychology Association, produces a publication called Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. Clinical psychologists make up the largest percentage
of the Division’s membership. The career path for becoming a consulting
psychologist has not yet been clearly defined but typically has started from clinical, counseling, industrial /organizational psychology, or social psychology, with predictable differences in emphasis and skills. Industrial /organizational psychologists tend to be more measurement oriented; counseling psychologists tend to be more career oriented
and coaching oriented; clinical psychologists tend to be more involved with employee assistance programs and with troubled employees; and social psychologists tend to focus on an interpersonal and systems orientation with strong quantitative skills.
Even less clear are the roles and boundaries of competence for mental health
providers such as counselors, social workers and psychiatric nurses, who have not been traditionally as involved in organizational consulting. The unique training and strengths of each discipline are likely to translate into valuable consulting niches. Practitioners from each field are advised to discuss these issues with their mentors.

Tags: consultation