Exploring the Counselors and Psychotherapists Perceptions of Therapeutic Errors in the Treatment Room

Abstract

A therapeutic error as a multifactorial phenomenon in psychotherapy and counseling is an action and behavior that is committed by the therapist and leads to treatment failure or client dissatisfaction with the treatment process. Thus, the treatment method deviates from the intended practical and scientific techniques. To this end, the present study aimed to identify the counselor’s perceptions of therapeutic errors in the treatment room. This qualitative study was conducted using conventional content analysis. The data were collected through in-depth and semi-structured interviews with counselors and psychotropics with at least 3 years of experience in psychotherapy and counseling in various fields. They were selected through purposive sampling in 2021 in Tehran. The data were saturated by interviewing 24 counselors and psychotherapists and analyzed by the content analysis approach. The findings showed that therapeutic errors occur for different reasons and in various forms and involve different aspects of the therapist-client interaction. The most important therapeutic errors were intrapersonal and organizational errors including; treatment errors, lack of practicality of the treatment, the therapist’s errors, mistakes committed due to the treatment space, non-compliance with ethical principles and standards, and not informing the clients. The occurrence of these errors and mistakes in the treatment session leads to the abandonment of the session by clients, negative experiences invoked by treatment sessions, and most importantly damage to clients and a range of negative consequences. The findings of this study can have some implications for understanding various forms of treatment errors, preventing errors in treatment sessions, and avoiding harm to clients in treatment sessions.