What is Psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy, as distinct from counselling, is used to denote services which provide specialized interventions (as distinct from "education" or "coaching" in the treatment of mental disorders or the problems of everyday adjustment). The term "Psychotherapy" is generally felt to include techniques utilized by professionals educated in one or more psychotherapy paradigms, such as, for example, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Rational Emotive Psychotherapy, Reality Therapy, Cognitive Psychotherapy, Psychosynthesis, Adlerian Psychology, Client-centered Psychotherapy. Counselling is a process which can include psychotherapeutic techniques but is, generally speaking, educational in its aim and of shorter duration. The goal of psychotherapy is to encourage understanding of the problem through the generation of insight and the building of trust in the therapeutic relationship. Adjunctive to this is the therapist's mandate to foster a warm and trusting therapeutic alliance to encourage the client to engage freely in exploration and expression of presenting problems. In Ontario, only members of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO) have the authority to identify themselves as Registered Psychotherapists (RPs).