Counsellors' Beliefs on Social Justice and the Medicalization of Counselling
Abstract
Counselling is becoming more standardized under a medicalized discourse of diagnosis and manualized treatment partly due to changing standards and administrative needs (Strong, 2017). Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this study explored how social justice-oriented counsellors are impacted by the medicalization of counselling. Counsellors stated medicalization was pathologizing individuals, marginalizing groups, and homogenizing therapeutic work. Driven by systems and industries gatekeeping resources, maintaining the social status quo, and the profession’s pursuit of prestige and profit through the medical model, the medicalization of counselling has been steadily growing. Counsellors centered the profession’s emerging identity as primarily relational in the nature of the work, with client-centered and feminist approaches reducing the power differential between client and counsellor. Counsellors believed that decolonizing counselling and adopting a multicultural, trauma-informed, and de-pathologizing approach to assist clients through holistic and individualized treatments would be beneficial to clients and the counselling profession.