Mental health counsellors’ perceptions on use of technology in counselling

Precursors of Openness to Provide Online Counseling: The Role of Future Thinking, Creativity, and Innovative Behavior of Future Online Therapists

“…Another study revealed that counselors choose to provide faceto-face counseling over online counseling. The main reasons to avoid online counseling from counselors' perspective is lack of training that will allow for dealing with ethical questions, using techniques adapted to the virtual space, and creating tailored skills (Nagarajan and Yuvaraj, 2019).…”

“…Despite the preponderance of the evidence pointing to the advantages of online counseling, providing training for it is only at nascent stages, and therefore, there is scarce literature on training practitioners for online counseling (Anthony, 2015). Moreover, current studies underscore the importance of providing updated training as counselors frequently hesitate to use technological advances in therapeutic sessions (Nagarajan and Yuvaraj, 2019). This study might help reduce such barriers by revealing personal characteristics of future professionals that might inhibit or encourage their openness toward providing online counseling.…”

Scaffolding the Online Peer-support Experience: Novice Supporters' Strategies and Challenges

“…There are also many different skills related to counselling that are specific to use in the virtual modality, such as tracking nonverbal cues, imagining the client's presence, written communication, etc. [19,48,74] 2.1.1 Online peer-support services. Peer-support service has existed for a long time [18,39,47,67,79].…”

“…Due to the differences in online versus in-person interactions, it is crucial for helpers to receive resources and training to navigate differences from face-to-face therapy and develop a strong therapeutic alliance with their clients. However, counsellors question the adequacy of training for traditional psychotherapy and observed that there is a dearth in training for online counselling [48]. Peers have shown a strong interest in learning peer counseling skills online to provide each other with emotional support-signaling an important unmet demand for guidance [52].…”

“…There are two major challenges to the effectiveness and sustainability of these peer-support platforms: volunteer turnover and lack of professional training are well reported by prior literature [10,48,50,65]. However, these findings tend to focus on a macro-level analysis of challenges that these platforms face which do not reveal the underlying causes on the supporter's individual level that might be caused by the lack of focus on novice supporters for volunteer retention and skill development.…”