Counsellors' responses to clients' non-attendance at counselling sessions

Abstract

Although there has been some study of clients who miss psychotherapy appointments, very little attention has been given to therapists' responses in such circumstances. A questionnaire survey of student counsellors working in British higher education institutions invited them to consider whether or not they would initiate any further contact with each of eight hypothetical non-attenders, described in case vignettes. It was predicted that responses would be influenced both by the subjects' theoretical approach to counselling and by their level of interpersonal dependency, as measured with the Interpersonal Dependency Inventory (Hirschfeld et al., 1977). It was found that the majority of counsellors were not subject to institutional guidelines about contacting non-attenders, and that responses ranged from contacting none to contacting all of the clients. Psychodynamic counsellors were found to be significantly more likely to initiate contact than were humanistic counsellors. There were no significant correlations between contact scores and intepersonal dependency scores but women were significantly more likely to initiate contact than were men. Many of the psychodynamic subjects had commented on their therapeutic use of written communications to interpret non-attendance to their clients.