A BRIEF HISTORY OF THERAPY ONLINE
by Murphy, L.J., Parnass, P., Mitchell, D.L., & O’Quinn, S.
As one might expect, Therapy Online (Worldwide Therapy Online Inc.) grew out of two disparate streams. The first was the narrative therapy work of Michael White and David Epston. They introduced the idea of sending letters to clients between sessions (White and Epston, 1990). White and Epston discovered that these letters were both meaningful to clients and powerful therapeutically. The second was the delivery of computers to the desks of every counsellor in the alcohol and drug clinic where Mitchell and Murphy worked. With these computers came Internet access and e-mail. The idea came to them almost immediately. They could marry the letter writing of narrative therapy with the computer technology of e-mail and help anyone anywhere at any time. They began in 1994 by creating a site and placing it on a bulletin board system. Such systems were ubiquitous in the early 1990’s (America Online is the only remaining example). An individual would take a powerful computer and set it up with a router that would allow multiple users to call in and play games against each other, exchange messages and download software. They installed their site on a server in White Rock,5British Columbia and offered therapeutic e-mail services, and regularly sought consultation and feedback from clients. They called it therap-e-mail. Two things struck them immediately. First, with text only, misinterpretation was a concern. They needed to develop techniques that would compensate for the lack of tone of voice and non-verbals in the textual medium. Second, the ethical considerations were qualitatively different from face to face counselling. They began to develop a catalogue of text-based therapeutic techniques that would address the absence of tone and non-verbals (Murphy & Mitchell, 1998) and they set to work analysing and providing solutions to the ethical concerns (cf. Mitchell and Murphy, 2004).One such text-based technique is called Emotional Bracketing. This technique involves placing the emotion or sub-text relevant to a comment in square brackets after the comment itself. So, for example, a counsellor might write “I have not heard from you in 3 weeks [feeling concerned]”. With this the client knows that the counsellor is not angry or disappointed or anything else but concerned. This technique also serves to prevent clients from projecting their own interpretation of the counsellor’s meaning onto the counsellor’s words. This and other techniques are covered extensively and in detail in Murphy and Mitchell (1998) and in Collie, Mitchell and Murphy (2000). By 1995 they launched the first web-based version of Therapy Online. By 1997 their work had caught the attention of the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC). The NBCC had struck a committee to create an ethical code for online practice and one6group in the committee was instructed to search the web and find the best example of ethical practice already in effect. This led them to Therapy Online. The resulting collaborative work was published online in 1998.
THE EMERGING FIELD OF CYBERCOUNSELLING: PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL REFLECTIONS Murphy, L.J., Parnass, P., Mitchell, D.L., & O’Quinn, S.
