Counselling is where a trained mental health professional helps you overcome/solve a specific/single issue. The counsellor provides you with a range of solutions and helps you choose one of those. Some counsellors will also help you and support you while you are implementing the suggested course of action. Counselling is a passive exercise for the person being counselled. It involves a lot of supporting and encouraging statements by the counsellor and often boosts up your morale and helps you feel able to do things.

Psychotherapy deals with many problems and issues and involves an attempt to help you change your thinking, emotional behaviour and coping capacity. The therapist does not offer tailor made solutions but helps YOU find solutions using your own skills. A good psychotherapist will usually spend 2-3 sessions assessing you and understanding your psyche (way of thinking and behaving). After these initial sessions, a diagnostic formulation will be shared where the possibilities of change will be presented. It is at this stage that the client/YOU will decide how and what you wish to change and why? Usually, one session will be devoted to looking at what is required, what is possible and what is not. After that sessions will start, and will require active participation and effort by the client. The therapist is usually a guide and facilitator, sometimes a teacher (!) and sometimes a listener.

You have to have an open mind and an ability to accept faults (in yourself). You have to work on the suggestions that are generated in session. You have to be regularly in contact with your therapist and attend all sessions, at least every fifteen days.