Legal Ethical & Professional Issues in the Field of Counseling
Legal Ethical and Professional Issues in Consultation
What are the legal and ethical issues as it pertains to consultation? Legal issues are relevant in two areas, laws governing the practice of your profession and criminal and civil laws that either directly or indirectly impacts the counseling professional practice. Laws governing the practice of counseling professionals are specifically articulated in the licensing law. Most licensing laws also require therapists to keep information confidential except when permitted or mandated by state law. What are ethical issues? …show more content…
As state licensing agencies and legislatures continue to draft and redraft legislation when creating statute which forms the basis of licensing laws they often look closely at the respective mental health professions evolving ethical code when drafting regulation and statute. Therefore by definition certain issues are both ethical and legal in nature. For example, while confidentiality is an ethical concept that often serves to protect the client or patient and privilege is a legal term of art that refers to a client’s statutory right to have confidential information protected, for our purposes making a distinction between the two can simply be arbitrary. Simply put, ethics involves learning what is right or wrong, and then doing the right thing. However the right thing is not always easy to identify. Ethics includes the fundamental ground rules by which we live our lives. Values that guide how we ought to behave are considered moral values, for example, values such as respect, honesty, fairness and responsibility. Statements around how these values are applied are sometimes called moral or ethical