Counselling is a relatively new profession for Malta, with the first courses for a Diploma in School Counselling and a degree in psychology having only started to be offered at the University in the 1990s.
In 2002, the Malta Association for the Counselling Profession (MACP) was set up. MACP today has about 80 registered members and has distinguished itself by providing high quality training to its members and other professionals. In 2008, a Master’s degree in counselling started being offered at the University of Malta, with the first cohort of students graduating in 2011. However, to date, the counselling profession in Malta still lacks a regulatory law and thus a regulatory body.
The Counselling Professions Bill, proposed in 2012, intends to give the necessary recognition the counselling profession deserves, and, at the same time, ensuring regulated standards to safeguard both the client and the professional. Only recently, the Bill was approved at committee stage by Parliament, meaning that now it won’t be very long until it becomes law.
Studies show that people with disability form a particular client group that is generally avoided by counsellors
Counselling and disability have for a long time been inextricably linked. In fact, research shows that most people with an acquired disability feel that they would have benefitted greatly from counselling support in the wake of the onset of their impairment.
However, studies also show that people with disability form a particular client group that is generally avoided by counsellors. Reasons for this avoidance by counsellors is claimed to stem from the fact that counsellors often feel they are not adequately trained to offer counselling services to this particular client group; and that most counsellors perceive working with clients with disability as a specialist or challenging area to work in.
Furthermore, researchers also argue that such avoidance by counsellors could stem from the fact that counsellors might be holders of the conventional idea that disability is ‘something’ which only happens to others, and thus might feel compelled to distance themselves from persons with disability.
A study was recently carried out locally with the aim of understanding how Maltese counsellors construct disability. The participants in this study were six Maltese counsellors who used different approaches to counselling and worked in different sectors.
Their years of practice ranged between two to 25 years. The findings of this research indicate that the social construction of disability among Maltese counsellors is influenced by three main forces.
The combination of these three forces creates a certain tension that has led counsellors to make contradictory claims about disability. The main forces are: the international and national politics of disability, the Maltese social and cultural aspects and the counsellors’ professional training and cultures of practice.
Participants had great difficulty with explaining their understanding of disability. They made contradictory statements between claims about disability not being inherent to the individual, and that it is the individual’s responsibility to overcome the limitations brought on by the disability.
They also made an explicit distinction between ‘deserving’ people with disability and ‘undeserving’ people with disability, by giving various examples of the distinction between the two groups, claiming there were those people with disability who were deserving of support and empowerment and those with disability who were undeserving of help because of their own feelings of anger towards their own situation.
The study also showed how the social construction of disability is influenced by the counsellors’ training and cultures of practice, which gave rise to further contradictions.
Notwithstanding all the contradictions in the counsellors’ narratives, the counsellors claimed, quite sincerely, that they would have liked to receive more training about disability issues.
The study also indicated a great need for counselling approaches, which would have the social model of disability as their foundation and which would help disabled people become more empowered.
This research was carried out in fulfilment of Amy Zahra’s Master of Arts degree in Disability Studies at the University of Leeds and was funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (STEPS), part-financed by the EU – European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, ‘Empowering people for more jobs and a better quality of life’.