They can because they think they can

Abstract

Based on interviews with practising speech and language therapists, Hersh (2010) identifies three key areas that constitute challenging aspects of ending therapy, fundamentally to do with client and clinician expectations of what therapy has to offer, managing therapy relationships that need to be robust yet temporary, and balancing client empowerment with the need to achieve fair distribution of resources. In this commentary I take a closer look at the first two of these aspects by dissecting an incident from my own therapy experience. I highlight particularly the importance of the way therapy is set up to the way in which it ends. Given the increasing importance attributed to client involvement in decisions regarding therapy, I also reflect briefly on the centrality of established evaluation measures to the potential for achieving informed consent and informed participation.

Keywords:

• Ethical issues
• discharge from therapy
• brain injury