From the point of view of clients, psychological counseling is for people with psychological confusion, psychological problems or slight psychological obstacles. Psychotherapy is aimed at people with mental illness (or mental illness), including serious psychological disorders and schizophrenia.
In terms of working methods, psychological counseling uses various counseling skills, including listening, emotion, encouragement, explanation, reflection, confrontation and explanation. Psychotherapy adopts free association, dream interpretation, systematic desensitization, exposure therapy and aversion therapy.
Different from the nature of working relationship, psychological counseling emphasizes that on the basis of equality, visitors are regarded as people with self-repair function, and more attention is paid to stimulating their own psychological potential; Although psychotherapy is also based on equal relationship, it emphasizes direct intervention and control of patients with mental illness because of their abnormal mental state.
As far as the difficulty of work is concerned, it is generally believed that the object of psychotherapy is people with mental illness, which makes psychotherapy more difficult than psychological counseling and its professional training more complicated. This is the same as teachers in ordinary schools and special schools in the field of education. The latter is more difficult to work and actually requires more workers. However, the difficulty of the two cannot be absolute. An outstanding psychological counselor's professional knowledge, skills and accomplishments are amazing.
From the service scope, the service scope of psychological counseling is larger, facing sub-health people, which is "nip in the bud"; The service scope of psychotherapy is small, which is aimed at patients with mental illness, and it is "preventing disease".