The changing landscape of voluntary sector counselling in Scotland
Abstract
In 1989 the Scottish Health Education Group and the Scottish Association for
Counselling compiled a directory of counselling services in Scotland. When asked if
they offered counselling, the great majority of voluntary sector organisations in the
welfare field said that they did, and they were therefore included in the directory,
generating over 500 entries in total, including, among others, all the Citizens Advice
Bureaux in Scotland. In 2001, I was involved in the implementation of another survey of
voluntary sector counselling, which provided an updated snapshot of provision across
the whole of Scotland, and offered the possibility of examining how the availability of
voluntary sector counselling had changed since the late 1980s (Bondi et al., 2003a). The
2001 survey solicited a rather different response from the earlier one. Several of the
organisations listed in the 1989 directory responded to the 2001 survey by telephoning
or writing to stress that they did not offer counselling. For example, a paid worker from
Victim Support contacted us to ask us to ignore any returns from local Victims Support
groups, insisting that any of them who claimed to offer counselling were wrong. A note
from another agency manager stated that “X does not deliver counselling […] and no
service user is ever given this impression”. In a similar vein when an interview was
conducted with a member of the Samaritans, he began the interview by saying, “I must
state now that Samaritans are not counsellors”. These responses provided graphic
evidence of a substantial shift in the place of counselling within voluntary sector
between the late 1980s, when it had been embraced as a description of a vast array of
services designed to meet welfare needs, and the beginning of the twenty-first century
when it was understood in much narrower terms from which many organisations actively
sought to distance themselves.