While some of the concern is clearly rooted in scarcity consciousness and the perception that coaches siphon off clients who can afford to pay counselors out of pocket (something very attractive to counselors who hate dealing with insurance companies) and thereby cut into counselors income, a very real concern is centered on the potential for coaches to try to coach someone who needs mental health care. Are coaches really qualified to identify mental illness?
Not according to counselors.
Their sense of do no harm is triggered – and rightly so -- when they hear coaches claim to help people solve relationship problems and improve marital communications (the purview of marriage and family counselors), end anxiety (a diagnosable mental illness), relieve depression (another diagnosable mental illness with high rates of suicide), and so on. They believe coaches are acting unethically in this regard.
Many if not most counselors believe that coaches in general – and life coaches in particular – are not well enough educated to recognize when a client is experiencing mental illness, and should be properly diagnosed and treated by a qualified, licensed mental health professional. They are outraged that coaches walk so close to their boundary as an allied profession, but without the depth of academic training, years of closely supervised experience, state administered licensing exams, or public accountability structures to protect vulnerable clients.
They have a point.
Unless coaches come into that field of work with other background as a therapist, most are unlikely to have the advantages of knowing the diagnostic distinctions that any counselor can recite in their sleep. Since there is A LOT of shades of gray in mental illness diagnosis – which is an interpretive art form more than a hard science as any good therapist will admit – how can coaches serve the best interest of clients who may be diagnosable?
After working more than 18 years as a psychotherapist, here are my 4 rules of thumb for coaching:
When a client is overwhelmed by their emotions for months on end in ways that interfere with normal functioning and relationships in daily life, a counselor is best suited to help. Coachees need to be emotionally available to tolerate the discomforts of taking risks for change.
Coaches should ask for a brief emotional history before agreeing to contract with clients, as a liability protection. Coachees need to not be actively suicidal, enmeshed in substance abuse, delusional, paranoid, oppositional, nor dealing with behaviors that are dangerous, abusive to others, or illegal in order to be coachable.
When a client can’t be self-regulating and willing to try something new to shift out of worry, fear, anger, sadness, shame, or guilt, and coaching is going nowhere after a number of weeks, short term counseling may be needed alone or in conjunction with coaching. Coachees need to be able to get beyond their emotional responses in order to take action.
1 comment:
Great post, Deah. I do agree that life coaches are not trained to recognize mental illness, and that they need to be careful about their boundaries and style and know when to refer someone to a different kind of professional such as a counselor or a financial planner or an attorney. I also wonder a bit why life coaches are singled out for lacking this. That is not really their job just as it's not the job of countless others who work closely with people but don't have training to diagnose mental illness. For example, human resources professionals and all kinds of managers may be called upon to talk extensively with people in the workplace about their job performance or sensitive issues. Self-disclosure of all kinds of things and long personal discussions can result, but do counselors worry over their lack of training too? Just a thought. Thanks for such a thought-inspiring post!
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