Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues in Counseling

We think you will find it useful to know something about us, the coauthors of this text, and how we came to write this book. Currently, we are both professors in the counseling graduate program at the University of New Orleans. Ted Remley is an attorney with several years of legal experience and also has been a school and community college counselor. Barbara Herlihy has worked as a school counselor and a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice, and is presently a counselor educator with a special interest in counselor ethics. Although we have been colleagues at the same institution only since 1997, we worked together over a period of many years, coauthoring articles and presenting numerous workshops on law and ethics in counseling. It was through these workshops that the idea for this book was born. The counselors who attended our workshops had much in common, although they practiced in a variety of settings with diverse clientele. They shared a deep and abiding commitment to the welfare of their clients, a desire to stay current with the ethical standards of their profession, and a need to feel competent in dealing with legal issues that arose in their work. At the same time, they sometimes felt overwhelmed by the complex and conflicting demands of situations they encountered. They frequently had difficulty distinguishing between legal and ethical issues. As we worked together in our presentations to these counselors, we found that we very rarely disagreed with each other, but we did bring differing perspectives. Barbara's ethics orientation led her to focus on client welfare and to emphasize protecting the client. Ted, with his legal orientation, helped us to consider another dimension, that of protecting the counselor. We believebothperspectives are important. Because both of us regularly teach graduate courses in professional orientation and ethics, we found ourselves discussing the need for a textbook written specifically forcounselorsthat would address ethical, legal, and professional issues. Thus, out of our backgrounds and shared interests was conceived a textbook that is unique in that it approaches each professional issue in counseling from both an ethical perspective and a legal viewpoint. We believe you will find this integrated approach particularly helpful as you grapple with the complexities inherent in the work of the counselor. We also believe that the best learning is active rather than passive and personalized rather than abstract. We hope that you will actively discuss and even argue the issues that are raised throughout the book and that you will work to develop your own personal stance on these issues. Typical situations and dilemmas that counseling practitioners encounter are presented in each chapter and are depicted in the CD of videotaped vignettes, available separately. We ask you to imagine that you are the counselor in each vignette and attend to what you would think, how you would feel, and what you might do in the situation. In these vignettes, as in real life, there is rarely a single right answer to the counselor's dilemma, so we hope that the vignettes will spark lively discussion.Remley, Theodore Phant is the author of 'Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues in Counseling', published 2004 under ISBN 9780131128149 and ISBN 0131128140.