Who are counsellors?

 Who are counsellors?

Here I will group as counsellors all those who are professionally trained and accredited to conduct counselling and psychotherapy. Therapy is derived from the Greek work 'therapeia' meaning healing. Attempts to differentiate between counselling and psychotherapy are never wholly successful. Because counselling and psychotherapy rep resent diverse rather than uniform knowledge and activities, it is more helpful to think of counselling approaches and psychological or 'talking therapies.

Possible ways of attempting to distinguish counselling from psy psychotherapy include the fact that psychotherapy deals more with mental disorders than counselling, that psychotherapy is longer-term and deeper, and that psychotherapy is predominantly associated with medical settings. However, matters are by no means this clear-cut. Many counsellors work in medical settings, have clients with recognised mental disorders and do longer-term work that may or may not be of a psychodynamic nature.

There is huge overlap between counselling and psychotherapy. As an illustration of this overlap, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) promulgates 'A definition of counselling and psychotherapy' as a single statement. Both counselling and psychotherapy are psychological processes that use the same theoretical models.