User:Zoopigeon/Dual Relationships

Dual Relationships
Dual Relationships or Multiple Relationships exist when a practitioner has both a professional relationship (e.g., therapist-client) and another role with the same individual. Dual Relationships pose an ethical issue for practitioners, as the types of relationship can vary from helpful and therepeutic (e.g. therapist/teacher- client/learner) to more harmful and potentially exploitive relationships.

Ethical Issues
As with much ethics in the helping professions, each potentially unethical situation must be assessed by its own merits. Dual relationships pose a problem in several different ways, violating several ethical principles.

Judgement and objectitivity can be negatively effected by the existence of dual relationships, especially so when the second relationship is that of a personal nature (such as a friendship). Errors in judgement can have particularly negative outcomes when dealing with potentially suicidal clients. Dual relationships may also detract from the practitioner's ability to provide an effective service to the client, especially when a conflict of interest occurs, for example, if the practitioner invests in a client's venture (see the novel, Lying on the Couch).

Perhaps the most significant ethical issue occuring in dual relationships is that of exploitation. As one relationship, the practitioner-client relationship, is unequel, a second relationship that is normally equal is no longer so, and opens the possibility of exploitation by the practitioner. This is liable to occur most often in sexual relationships (which most ethics codes prohibit, and are in many cases illegal), which account for the largest proportion of complaints against practising professionals, and in bartering relationships, where clients cannot afford the service and attempt to pay with services or goods of their own.