Issue with licensure and government refusal on licensure
There were several licensure issues in regards to government refusal on licensure. It has been known that South Korea disapproved of a mental health counselor license for counselling psychologists as the Mental Health Welfare (MHW) has already approved several mental health-related licenses, which include the mental health clinical psychologist and mental health social worker. Therefore, the issue on the counselor’s licenses approval request was assumed unnecessary due to other availability of the licenses as mentioned (Young et al., 2016).
Moreover, this results in counselling training programs to be lacking a unified accreditation system (Young et al., 2016). This further questions the quality of training which can possibly fluctuate with the level of competence each training site possesses.
Counselors presence
In relation to this issue, the challenges remained continuous as it can be difficult to define the identity and the role of counselling psychologists in South Korea (Young et al., 2016). General comparison has often been made with counselling psychologists with other adjacent mental health professionals such as clinical psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, and art therapists. In the extreme issue of mental health professionals, some South Koreans may believe fortune tellers are life counselors as well.
In another case, qualified counselors in South Korea have a tendency to supervise trainees rather than meeting clients (Young et al., 2016), which is an undesirable situation as a great number of clients needing the services may be left with a lack of counselors’ presence and availability towards the community.
Financial issue
Counselling fees are not fully covered by current medical insurance in Korea.
Suicide in South Korea has always been an issue as the suicide rate at this current time placed the country the 10th highest in the world according to the World Health Organization (2016). The continuous efforts of the “Mental Health Counselor Council” has been working towards persuading the Ministry of Mental Health and Welfare to include counselling psychologists as government-approved professionals who can work at mental health centers with proper accreditation (Young et al., 2016).