The amount of information regarding the counselling profession and its practices in the Republic of Georgia is extremely limited. However, this paucity of evidence regarding the profession could be traced to a qualitative study conducted by Murphy et al. (2018) on the provision of mental health care services towards internally displaced persons (IDPs) who were affected by the armed conflicts that occurred in the country. In the study, they tabled their findings on the type of mental health providers that existed in Georgia, their respective facilities that they practiced in, as well as the services that they provided – in the table, counsellors were not mentioned at all (Murphy et al., 2018). Murphy et al. (2018) explain that instead, counselling services are often offered in clinical settings by the psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists who work in these centers.
In the same vein, the country also has limited human resource capacity for its mental health field despite the growing burden of mental illnesses faced by its civilians (Murphy et al., 2018). According to various researchers (Steel et al., 2009; Porter & Haslam, 2005; Sabes-Figuera et. al, 2012; all as cited in Murphy et al., 2018), low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) such as Georgia would find it extremely challenging to solidify its mental healthcare system especially if the countries are currently facing internal armed conflicts.
Currently, there are only a few centres that are dedicated as mental health services for the public (see no.3). As a whole counselling as a profession is massively underrated in Georgia and there are no reliable statistics on the amount of counsellors that are active in the country as well as number of mental health services that are up to date.