Chemical dependency counseling entails helping people to understand and overcome the causes of substance abuse and addiction in their lives. A chemical dependency counselor analyzes the way substance abuse affects the personal and physical relationships between the patient and people in his or her life. The duty to protect is a health care provider responsibility that requires the professionals to protect the patient or potential victims from any foreseeable danger posed by the patient. The first way through which a chemical dependency counselor exercises the duty to protect is through danger prediction. Indeed, a chemical dependency counselor should be able to foresee the dangers a patient poses to him or herself and even others. In essence, the counselor must predict these dangers, note them, and take the right steps thereafter. If a counselor is careless about predicting these dangers and someone gets hurt, he or she may be prosecuted in a court of law for not playing the key role of preventing the danger. Section three of the American Counseling Association, ACA, calls for professional responsibility. Counseling is a sensitive line of duty and therefore one needs to only accept employment for which they are qualified as per their education, training, experience, as well as the state and national professional licensing (American Counseling Association, 2014).
The second way through which a chemical dependency counselor exercises his or her duty to protect is through warning the patient or potential victims of the foreseeable danger. A patient with a drug addiction problem can be faced by a number of threats that are foreseeable. For example, the patients can be facing dangers such as health complications and even self-harm. A patient addicted to chemical substances can develop health complications such as heart diseases, different types of cancer, and organ failures such as lung and kidney collapse, and liver cirrhosis depending on the substance being abused. The counselor has the duty to warn the patient of such danger. Other dangers include hallucinations and mental state instability which may lead to violence and suicidal thoughts.
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The chemical dependency counselor must also inform the potential victims of the dangers that may arise while around the patient (Tribbensee et al., 2003). For example, the counselor needs to notify the family, spouse, school or employer of a patient who has the potential of harming them. Although there are laws and ethics that protect the counselor-patient relationship that require the counselor not to disclose the information provided during the counseling sessions, the duty to protect calls for counselors who have enough reason to believe that the patient has a potential of harming themselves or others to inform the right people who can protect the patient or tell the people who are at risk to take necessary precautions. The patient can even be involuntarily confined to a medical facility until they are stable. If the potential victims are children or older adults who are not in a position of protecting themselves, the counselor needs to report to the right authorities, for example, children social services. This implies that the third way through which the chemical dependency counselors exercise their duty to protect is through acting as mandated reporters. A mandated reporter is required by the law to report any ongoing or suspected abuse or danger, for example, sexual or physical abuse, and even negligence. For instance, if the patient is a parent, the chemical dependency problem endangers the well-being of children, and thus the counselor needs to report to the right authorities.
The word “protect” is repeated over twenty times in the American Counseling Association code of ethics to emphasize on the duty of the counselors to ensure the well-being of their patients as well as to make sure that the situation they are handling does not result to the harm of others. In the mission statement of the American Counseling Association, enhancing people’s quality of life is clearly stated as one of the key goals of the counselors. To improve people’s quality of life, therefore, the counseling profession must ensure that the patients, as well as the people around them, are protected from all sorts of dangers that can escalate from the situations the counselors are handling, for example, depression, substance abuse and addiction, and mental illness among others. Such conditions have high potentials of resulting in violence and other types of abuse. Protection is, therefore, an aspect of emphasizing because of the high probability of harm associated with the situations handled along the profession.
The emphasis on the word “protect” in the American Counseling Association code of ethics is also to make sure that the counselors stay safe in their line of work. The code of ethics not only protects the patients but also the counselors themselves. The counselors are required to keep safe boundaries and safeguard themselves from any harm that may result from their line of work. Counselors, from time to time, handle patients that can be a threat to their safety. By following their profession’s code of ethics, the counselors minimize the chances of getting harmed by patients in different ways.
References
American Counseling Association. (2014). ACA Code of Ethics. Retrieved from https://www.counseling.org/resources/aca-code-of-ethics.pdf
Tribbensee, N. E.; Claiborn, C. D. (2003). "Confidentiality in psychotherapy and related contexts." In O'Donohue, William T.; Ferguson, Kyle E. Handbook of professional ethics for psychologists: issues, questions, and controversies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
