Table of Contents
What are the legal and ethical issues in Counselling?
In addition, there are ethical concerns in managed care services offered by counsellors to clients. These concerns centered on informed consent, confidentiality, maintaining records, competence, integrity, human welfare, conflict of interest, and conditions of employment (Daniels, 2001). It helps clients maintain a sense of dignity. But, the code of ethics followed by counselors allows the sharing of some information. For instance, a client may tell you they plan to commit suicide or murder someone. In such cases, this leaves you with no option but to alert relevant authorities. This chapter describes the six core ethical principles underlying ethical analysis in the profession of counseling. These principles are autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, justice, fidelity and veracity. Two Legal Issues in Clinical Psychology Informed consent and confidentiality are two areas clinical psychology which are legal issues. Informed consent is both an ethical directive as well as a law. Confidentiality is an important ethical principle in counseling: You can’t help a client effectively unless she knows you won’t betray her secrets.
What are ethics in Counselling?
What are ethics in counseling? Ethics in counseling are suggested standards of conduct based on professional values and moral decision-making. Ethics in counseling are concerned with doing what is best for the client. Ethics are important to protect both the client and the counselor. Legal ethics can be simply defined as a code of conduct which may be written or unwritten. Such a code of conduct is meant to regulate the behaviour of a practising legal professional towards the court, the presiding judge, his client and his adversaries in the courtrooms. These principles are autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, fidelity, justice, veracity, and self-respect (American Counseling Association, 2014; British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, 2018). There are three main types of ethical issues: Utilitarian, Deontological, and Virtue. Utilitarian ethics focus on the consequences of an action, while deontological ethics focus on the act itself. Virtue ethics focuses on the character of the person acting.
What does legal issues mean in counseling?
Counseling is a subject of exercise that exists and evolves on the intersection of ethics and regulation. Counseling is a hard endeavor. Every character who chooses to be a counselor is certain to exist on the complicated intersection of diverse moral and felony norms. It is quite natural that a lawyer is paid fees for imparting legal counseling to his client. General counseling on the other hand is counsel or advice given on matters related to general interest such as education, job placement, career building and the like. Ethics is traditionally subdivided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics. We can think of ethics as the principles that guide our behavior toward making the best choices that contribute to the common good of all. Ethics is what guides us to tell the truth, keep our promises, or help someone in need.
What is the importance of legal Counselling?
Counseling is all about giving such information which a client would like to know regarding his legal problem/case. Client may require such information to take some decision about the course of action he/she may like to take in future. Ethics are important in counseling, as they are a means to protect the welfare of the client and counselors by clearly outlining what is appropriate. Counsellors and therapists often come across some difficult and sensitive subjects. This leaves the client in a vulnerable position. This chapter defines the ethical and legal standards applied to the practice of counseling and psychotherapy. The standards are: confidentiality, privacy, privileged communication, roles and relationship boundary issues, informed consent, responsibility, and competence. Counselling is not a statutorily regulated profession which means the title of ‘counsellor’ is not protected by law. This means that even an individual with minimal training can call themselves a ‘counsellor’. Client confidentiality in a nutshell Your counsellor has a legal duty to report anything to do with terrorism or acts of terror. If you were to disclose matters involving a serious/life-threatening risk of harm to self or others, they might have to act on it.
What are ethical and legal issues?
Ethical issues involve rules or standards governing the conduct of members of a profession, while legal issues involve rules governing the conduct of persons within a community, state, or country. Legal standards are those standards that are set forth in governmental laws. Ethical standards are based on the human principles of right and wrong. Unethical accounting, harassment, health and safety, technology, privacy, social media, and discrimination are the five primary types of ethical issues in the workplace. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. Legal is the word used to define anything that concerns the law or its workings. It is applicable to all practices, languages, processes, procedures, cultures, and other relative concepts in a system of the law. On the other hand, ethics is the word used to define the traditional norms and morals of an individual. This framework approaches ethical issues in the context of four moral principles: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice (see table 1). This framework has been influential because the values it espouses seem to align with our moral norms.