Guidelines to resolve the conflict of responsibility
Any counselor has a primary responsibility to promote the welfare of their clients and ensure that the client’s dignity is preserved during the counseling. The counseling profession ethics requires the therapist to fulfill other parties’ responsibilities as well. Other parties, in this case, include the client’s family members, the institution he/she is working from, the court or even a working colleague. In a situation whereby the counselor is faced with a dilemma and cannot easily resolve the conflict of responsibilities that the case they are handling come with, client’s confidentiality is always at risk and to come up with a decision that doesn’t violate the client’s confidentiality is always the problem.
In most cases when the client’s life is at risk (they want to end their life, or someone else is threatening to), the court has ordered information or the information the client has disclosed suggests that there are other people at risk that when the therapists get caught up deciding where their primary responsibility should lie. In such an occasion it’s hard for the counselor to make their mind whether to continue protecting the client or solve the risk and end up violating the trust entrusted by the client.
The general requirement that calls for the counselor to make sure information is kept confidential shouldn’t be applied when disclosure is necessary to protect the client or other identified people from grave dangers. The same case applies when legal requirements request that confidential information must be revealed to solve a suggested law-breaking scenario. And in this case, the counselor should firstly consult with other professionals on a smart way out of it.
The first step a counselor should take when a conflict of responsibilities arises is to look up to the American Counseling Association (ACA) code of ethics and see what precisely the association requires of them to maintain in the profession. Follow the steps recommended by the association upholding all the ethics required of them and coming up with a solution that doesn’t put direct harm to the client they are dealing with.
If that step doesn’t resolve the conflict, then the counselor’s next step should be adhering to the law, regulations and other legal authority requirements. From this point, the counselor should judge the situation based on what is required of them by the law. Therefore if the law requires anyone in the counseling profession facing the position that the counselor is meeting to report to family or the appropriate authority, then the counselor should do precisely that.
At this point, if the matter is not resolved correctly, then the counselor should take further action which is appropriate to the situation. The step might involve consulting the proper institutional authorities, the counseling licensing boards, the voluntary national certification body, counseling profession ethics, and federal or state committees and gain information on how to end the dilemma of responsibility that the counselor is facing. Thttps://studygroom.com/psy-8763-d2-student-2/his point is the furthest a therapist can go to resolve their responsibility conflict, but the intervention should be applied if the counselor intervening has just been retained to review the work of another counselor or when the action would end up violating the client-counselor agreed privacy and trust rights.