Who Needs Rehabilitation Counselling?
Rehabilitation counselling is a special type of counselling designed to help people with disabilities reach their professional and personal goals. In general, rehabilitation counselling specialists help their patients to be more independent and gain a sense of worth. Their end goal is to produce successful adults despite their disabilities, which can either be mental or physical as well as mild or severe.
Often a long process, rehabilitation counselling consists of goal evaluation, helping a person achieve those goals, and getting to grips with problems that arise along the way. To ensure success in counselling, the individual must not have goals that are too hard to reach in light of their particular disability. Oftentimes this is difficult to do with people who have become incapacitated later in life. For them it's hard to admit that the goals that once were very possible are no longer achievable. This is why it is often difficult to provide rehabilitation counselling with those who suffer from accidents than those who have been disabled since they were young.
The goals of rehabilitation counselling vary for every individual. But in general, it is to empower him to meet both his personal and professional goals. This often consists of getting a particular type of job and being able to live independently. In some cases, getting into a relationship or engaging in one's favorite activity may also be included in rehabilitation counselling. Most rehabilitation counsellors would focus on vocational goals because vocational success often leads to independence and social connections.
Success is not the same for every individual. For this reason it makes sense to identify the person's strengths and weaknesses to be able to determine the right goal for him. But while you can never expect a severely disabled individual to live alone or independently, it's possible that he still wish to live by himself someday. The goal of the rehabilitation counsellor then is to present to him the options available for him and discuss the possible problems with each of these options. Acknowledging the uniqueness of each disability is important for a specialist to be able to design a program according to each individual needs.