What does the Future of Innovation hold for the clients and providers of therapeutic services? As a trainer, I have created bespoke software to communicate, teach and facilitate many therapists from all over the globe who want to use innovative methods of delivery to clients. Currently this concentrates on service delivery via email and Internet Relay Chat, and training delivery via forums, email, chat and a learning programme that is automatically delivered to the desktop. But what will my future training programs look like?
Let’s start with SMS or texting via mobile phones. I am teaching therapists to communicate with clients in fewer than 160 characters, a need that is increasingly apparent as charities and similar mental health organisations offer this service to those in need. My current philosophy in training others to be a distance therapist is that in order to gain a truly experiential meaningful training, my trainees never experience my as a physical being, either by photo on the web (hence my pic for this project), meetings face-to-face or telephone calls. All communication is via text because – hey – that’s how they will experience their clients once they have finished training. But how (and should I) be training therapists in bursts of less than 160 characters?
Let’s move on to being a Virtual Therapist in an environment such as Second Life, and providing training for that. This is somehow easier than the SMS training dilemma – I will have a physical presence of sorts through my avatar, and can meet in my virtual office or conference suite or Institute to train them, and use virtual tools. But we already have clients using such services, and it is documented that such clients often attend sessions as different representations of the self – and sometimes even change avatars partway through a session. Should I use this fact as part of my training programme, and illustrate this myself by appearing in one training session as KateElize Larnia, or as someone who looks completely different with a different name. Or even as a wolf or robot?
How about training therapists to use social and professional networking sites responsibly? Should I do this through Facebook or Twitter, for example? Facebook is hardly a training platform, but my trainees need an experiential platform. And if Twitter… can I train therapists in training sessions of under 140 characters – a task even more daunting than that of SMS!
And behind all of this lies the question of ethics. As an ethicist myself, I know the reality of keeping up with technological innovation in Therapy, and how the profession has been playing catch up with their uses for well over ten years now. I see a Future of Innovation in therapeutic interventions that will see me delivering training as a hologram, beaming myself to my trainees to train them in hologrammatic therapy. So maybe the Future of Innovation in Therapy will bring us back round to traditional face-to-face methods after all…
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