Mr. Eoin O'Sullivan:

When clients are looking for support, they do not really care about qualifications. They just want someone to listen. Over the last several years, thankfully, I have seen clients become more confident and educated. They know the questions to ask and who they are looking for and will now ask for qualifications. Much of the time, however, this will be because they have had a negative experience. They have been to see somebody of whom they never asked these questions, and they have felt let down and sometimes harmed from that experience. Now, not every therapist is going to be a match for every client, and this is vitally important for a successful therapeutic outcome. It is necessary, though, to have therapists who are experienced.

My thoughts are that they would need to have gone through the process of counselling or psychotherapy themselves. They must have an education on psychological development, trauma, different coping mechanisms, unconscious biases and the theories that are out there now. Clients now are putting their trust in people's hands because they have reached the end of their tether. They do not know where else to go. I have heard of people presenting at accident and emergency departments with suicidal ideation and being told to go home because there was nothing that could done for them. They were told they were not that serious. People in that situation go home and feel absolutely dejected and rejected. They do not just heal or recover. What will happen is that they might go into their shell for six months before they will again gather up their courage to ask somebody for help. Hopefully, the next time they will be met.

Many clients whom I have dealt with have told me, no pressure, that I was their last chance. Those people told me that they had tried everything and been let down and let down again. I refer to the work needed in this regard. People come in and sometimes they are looking for a quick fix and some magic formula. If I am engaging with a client who is 40 years of age, for example, that person may have been doing everything possible using the tools at his or her disposal, whatever coping mechanisms he or she had, and sometimes that might be avoidance or burying something. If we avoid something and bury it, though, then it festers. Eventually, the pressure becomes too much. When a person like that presents to me as a client, I am looking at 40 years of suffering. It is going to take a significant amount of time. First, it will take time before the person builds up his or her trust in me to the level where it allows him or her to disclose things to me that he or she may have never said aloud to anybody else in his or her life. I refer to the risk of this. The person will already, for decades, have been telling himself or herself that this happened to him or her as a child or he or she did this as a teenager, and it will have absolutely destroyed his or her sense of self and self-worth. It is heartbreaking to see.