South Africa

By virtue of SA’s history and the country’s current socio-cultural and mental health care context, counselling psychology faces a number of challenges (Bantjes et al., 2016). These include finding ways to overcome apartheid’s legacy of inequality and engage critically with the call to advance a social justice agenda and work as agents of change while embracing the evidence based practice movement. The specialty also needs to achieve greater racial diversity, make a meaningful contribution to meeting the country’s mental health care needs, apply psychological knowledge to promote physical health and well-being, and respond to the call to indigenize the practice of psychology.

Moreover, HIV/AIDS and other health problems pose a great challenge for the country’s health system. South Africa ranks in the lowest quartile for provision of health care globally. South Africa possesses the largest number of people with HIV/AIDS in the world. AIDS contributes to dwindling employment opportunities; affects productivity; reduces international financial investment; increases poverty, crime, and the destruction of families; and decreases opportunities.

Besides, even Black community members with some knowledge of psychology maintain a general mistrust of Whites in South Africa, leading to a mistrust of the profession because the majority of psychologists are White. The apartheid system caused mistrust of Whites and Western colonial traditions. For changes to occur, counselling psychology must be perceived as having relevance in the larger community. Counselling psychology will need to consider what it can learn from traditional healing practices as well as better train new psychologists to work from a culturally sensitive perspective.

Lastly, South African peoples rooted in traditional families have extended family networks through which to seek support; many have access to traditional healers, particularly in rural areas. Traditional healers are a central source of assistance when psychosocial and medical problems are encountered. A practice of counselling emanating from outside traditional cultural boundaries is thus foreign to many Black South Africans. However, the urbanization of large percentages of the population has meant the disruption of many traditional sources of assistance, and alternate means such as professionally trained counsellors are needed.