If you are in an abusive relationship, it can be extremely risky engaging in online therapy due to the potential risk of the abuser finding the therapist’s details/messages/emails in the client’s device or overhearing a conversation with the therapist.
The following information has been extracted from the UK government website.
Anyone can be a victim of domestic abuse, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexuality or background.
If you answer yes to any of the following questions, you might be in an abusive relationship.
Emotional abuse
Does your partner, or former partner, ever:
Threats and intimidation
Does your partner, or former partner, ever:
Physical abuse
The person abusing you may hurt you in a number of ways.
Does your partner, or former partner, ever:
Sexual abuse
Sexual abuse can happen to anyone, whether they’re male or female.
Does your partner, or former partner, ever:
Other contraindications to counselling may include, but is not limited to:
Because the therapist may not be able to accurately assess how the client is doing physically (for example, seeing cuts on the client’s arms, or the progression of medical conditions which could cause a sudden episode of severe illness such as diabetes or epilepsy), the therapist needs to rely on self-reporting by the client and this could potentially lead to missed signs of risk to the client, which would be extremely hard to manage working remotely online. Especially if the presentation of severe mental health conditions manifest in missing sessions, being late and/or not responding to messages. Although, during sessions this can also be missed, due to a lot of body language cues not being seen by the therapist (in live chat or email therapy there would be no body language cues whatsoever).
In the case of substance abuse the therapist wouldn’t be able to smell alcohol or look closely at the client’s pupils to tell if the client is under the influence, and that can determine whether a person maintains full psychological contact, because when dealing with addiction and most of these disorders mentioned above, the client can break away from reality throughout the session (not being able to tell what is real and what is not) creating potential risks to the clients themselves or others around them, which becomes extremely hard for the therapist to manage remotely whilst working online.