Counselling Clients with Disabilities: Introduction to the Issues

The purpose of this course, and its companion “Counselling Clients with Intellectual Development Disorder: A Look at What Works,” is to build your capacity as a mental health professional to provide high-quality support and appropriate therapeutic interventions to this group of people whose needs have been largely misunderstood and under-recognised. The specific aim of this course is to acquaint you with the issues which surround the counselling of people with disabilities. What are those issues, and how do they impact on the lived experience of those labelled “disabled”? How shall we think about “disability”, particularly those whose impairments may be intellectual? What theoretical notions should guide not only our thoughts, but also the frameworks we set up for helping, and the very interventions we undertake with such clients in our practice? What, finally, are the principal issues with which successful counsellors of clients with intellectual developmental disorder must be familiar? Those who experience disability are disadvantaged over “other” people on just about every continuum we can use to measure, for a wide range of reasons at every level from individual through family, institutional and societal. Thus coming to grips with the complexity of their situation is a challenging task. In this course we focus mainly on intellectual developmental disorder, although in many instances we point out how most types of disabilities share a similar situation.