Essay - History of Online Counselling

Online counselling is still a relatively new discipline. Most definitions of online counselling limit the scope to help provided via the Internet. If we enlarge the definition to include any technology mediated psychotherapeutic interaction then telephone counselling should also be included. The telephone was patented in 1876 (Telephone, 2009). The development of the telephone network provided the media for the phone counselling services to be operated from the 1950s onwards. Phone counselling services share many of the same characteristics as other forms of technology mediated counselling including lack of visual cues and disinhibition effects. The two most widely known telephone counselling services are Samaritans and Lifeline International. The Samaritans was started in 1953 in London by a young vicar called Chad Varah. The first call to the service was made on 2nd November 1953. (Samaritans, 2008). Lifeline International was started in Sydney, Australia by the Rev. Dr. Sir Alan Walker with the first call being taken on 16th. March 1963. (Lifeline, 2008). The psychological aspects of computer mediated communications were first explored in the development of a program named ELIZA by Joseph Weizenbaum in the early to mid 1960s. ELIZA applied pattern matching rules to the users input to generate open ended questions similar to a dialog found with an empathic Rogerian therapist. Weizenbaum was surprised that users of his program would treat the dialog with the program as if it were a dialog with another human. He was interested in the psychological implications of this. (Weizenbaum, 2008). A key discovery from this work was that people would willingly engage in text based communication for therapeutic purposes. (Kraus, Zack, Strickler, 2007, p53). Other forms of mass 2 way communication did not occur until the advent of the Internet in the 1970s. The Internet infrastructure was developed during the 1970s and became available to commercial interests in 1988. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which

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Essay - History of Online Counselling

allowed for a global distributed page database. By the early 1990s facilities such as email, web browsing, chat, bulletin boards became available first to university populations and then to the public. (Internet, 2008). The Internet and the World Wide Web made possible one-to-many communications and peer to peer communication at very low cost. (Kraus et al, 2007, p57). The development of the Internet and the World Wide Web provided the platform to allow the development of new ways to communicate. These new communication methods included email, chat and video conferencing. In 1994 the Samaritans set up an email address available to those in despair or suicidal (Kraus et al, 2007, p59). Video conferencing was not a new technology at the time but was only generally point to point. The Internet would allow inexpensive global video conferencing to become widely available. The roots of online counselling can be found within university environments. This may have been due to university students having the earliest unrestricted access to Internet and local area networks. Providing student populations with counselling was more cost effective using online methods than on a one to one basis. Early systems provided information which was accessible easily by students accessing bulletin boards, new groups. Cornell University provided a bulletin board named Dear Uncle Ezra in 1986 where students could anonymously post their problems and staff would post responses that all students could read. Grohol in 1991 set up Usenet newsgroups and an index of mental health support groups. In 1995 he pioneered an online mental health chat system (Webchat Broadcasting System). Both were free services. (Kraus et al, 2007, p58) During the 1990s both individual therapists and some commercial business ventures started to offer mental health support services and counselling on the Internet. No one individual can be identified as being the first pioneer. However some who are known to have been early adopters in the field include:

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David Sommers using email, chat and video conferencing with hundreds of clients until 1998

Leonard Holmes trialled a try it for free - then pay system but found it did not work as most clients did not turn into paying clients.

Ed Needham ran a chat therapy site Cyberpsych from August 1995 till 1998. Richard Sanbury began an online practice in 1997 and still is currently in practice. Roger Gould provided a Therapeutic Learning Program on the web in 1997 at masteringstress.com which is an interactive text based self help system. (Kraus et al, 2007, p60)

Several business entrepreneurs sought to sell the services of professional therapists online by providing online systems to manage clients with revenue coming from commissions from every consultation. Such initiatives included etherapy.com, lifehelper.com and here2listen.com. None of these business ventures was successful. Ethical guidelines for online counselling were developed during the 1990s by the Amercian Psychological Association (www.apa.org) in 1997 and by the International Society for Mental Health Online (www.ismho.org) in 1999. The New Zealand Association of Counsellors (www.nzac.org.nz) has only this year updated its ethics recommendations to include online counselling. And what of the future of online counselling? Online counselling seems to be a small niche market which is still being defined. As already stated, an effective business model for online counselling has yet to be found. There is a public perception about the Internet which is linked with free. As most of Internet content is free, it can be hard to market fee paying services. Health insurance generally does not cover online provision of services. I suspect that what we currently define as online counselling needs to evolve into something with more added value than what is

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currently offered. What is offered tends to be a mirror of what is offered in face to face counselling. I believe that at present the potential of the available technology just isnt being used to deploy healthcare services. Much more imagination and integration of the technology needs to offered to online consumers of mental health services. All the components are there in social networking, blogging, mobility, interactive interfaces tailored to individual users, virtual reality for behavioural experimentation, educational information delivery, and a human interaction with a therapist (or mentor). What is missing at present is the imagination to integrate all these into one coherent holistic experience that will fully engage a person on a lifelong path to personal growth and change.

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References
Internet (2008). Retrieved 30th August 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet Kraus, r. Zack, J. Strickler, G. (2004). Online Counselling - A Handbook For Mental Health Professionals. San Diego, CA: Elsevier. Lifeline (2008). Retrieved 30th August 2008 from http://www.lifeline-international.org/history Samaritans (2008). Retrieved 30th August 2008 from
http://www.samaritans.org/about_samaritans/governance_and_history/samaritans_history.aspx

Telephone (2008). Retrieved 30th August 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Weizenbaum (2008). Retrieved 30th August 2008 from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

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