You are a supervising chemical dependency counselor at an intensive treatment facility. In this role, you facilitate group sessions, individual counseling sessions, and family therapy sessions for alcohol and substance abuse clients and their families. In addition to the above-described direct treatment, you also supervise several other counselors in a residential program.

Client relationships are the core of this profession. Forming and maintaining appropriate, professional relationships is of the utmost significance when it comes to successfully helping clients, and this is a core concept of training.

Prepare a memo to the new counselors under your supervision. The purpose of the memo is to inform the counselors of the potential ethical issues they could face that deal with their relationships with clients.

In your memo, please provide the following information:

Interoffice Memorandum
To: New chemical dependency counselors
From: Supervising counselor
Subject: Potential ethical issues
Date: mo/date/year

As a chemical dependency counselor, the counselor/client relationship is paramount to the client's success in treatment. There must be a level of trust between the client and the counselor for the client to be successful in treatment. To develop and grow that trust, the counselor and the client must have a thorough understanding of the client's rights as well as the counselor's duties or obligations to the client. The counselor must also avoid engaging in behaviors that can compromise that relationship and destroy that trust.

• Section 1: List and briefly describe the basic principles that relate to client rights including, but not limited to, the following:
  • The right to be informed
  • The right to privacy and confidentiality
• Section 2: List and briefly describe the basic duties and/or obligations you have to your clients including, but not limited to, the following:
  • Maintaining clients dignity and promote their welfare
  • Behaving ethically
  • Maintaining level of competence
• Section 3: List and briefly describe 3 potential ethical issues chemical dependency counselors could face as a result of their relationship with clients.
  • Sexual relationship with a client
  • Improperly transmit or improperly protect a client’s private health information
  • May place third party at risk.

Your memo should have 3 separate sections: 1 section for each of the questions listed above.