PREFACE

      Welcome to the sixth edition! So much has changed since the 5th edition. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic transformed—at least temporarily—psychotherapy and counseling from encounters primarily conducted in-person to virtual meetings convened over Zoom, FaceTime, and other video conferencing and digital tools. Creative innovation, surprising research findings, landmark legal decisions, demographic shifts, and new perspectives continue to bring change to psychotherapy and counseling, and to ethical standards, theory, and practice. To address these trends and changes, we’ve updated all the chapters in this new edition and have created some new chapters.

      The authorship of this book has also changed. Ken Pope and Melba Vasquez co-authored the first five editions of this book, and they’re still here. For this sixth edition, they reached out to two distinguished colleagues, Professors Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas and Hector Y. Adames, both of whom are also licensed practitioners. Both Nayeli and Hector agreed to sign on as co-authors with Ken and Melba. The sixth edition benefits from four very diverse perspectives and co-authors who worked collaboratively to create an edition that motivate us all to strengthen and inform our ethical awareness and sense of personal and collective ethical responsibility.

      The poor, unloved preface achieved sad notoriety as the least read part of most books. We’ll keep this one short—limiting it to only a note on terminology. We hope the conciseness inspires you to read on, set yourself apart from the crowd, and gain elite status as a reader of the preface.

      A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

This book discusses the varied and complex ethical issues that confront psychologists working as psychotherapists, other kinds of therapists (e.g., behavior therapists), and counselors. For brevity and convenience, we often use just one of these terms—rather than some hyphenated form of all three—in a sentence. Similarly, some therapists identify those to whom they provide services as clients; others use the term patients. Again, for brevity and convenience, we have used these terms interchangeably throughout the book.