Informed consent in psychotherapy and counselling encompasses sharing sufficient information with a prospective client to allow him make an informed decision about the proposed treatment. Embracing informed consent practices as a psychotherapist is an important risk management strategy and a method that ensures clients receive the best professional services. It lays a collaborative treatment foundation, breads respect and trust, and promotes a client’s autonomous functioning, thus, ensures a positive treatment outcome. Clinical Preparation Journal Assignment Paper
The main components of informed consent for psychiatric mental health treatment are disclosure, competency, decision capacity, and documentation of consent. Although informed consent serves as a significant feature in all psychotherapy cases, it requires special attention with homicide ideation, suicide ideation, and auditory/visual hallucination (A/VH) (Rudd et al., 2019). As such, the informed consent components are limited to some extent to allow the involved parties to clearly understand the treatment goal, prevent future suicidal, homicidal or hallucination behaviors, and formulate effective decisions.