There are ethical, legal and practical concerns over online counseling and psychotherapy. Ethical concerns include things such as controlling the access to valuable and secret information on the net. There is going to be continuing flow of private information and communication between the therapist and the client. Thus, a strong network security is needed. People are concerned about what would happen, if anybody is going to intercept the communication.
Other ethical issues revolve around some conventional sides of therapy. Therapy is a human interaction. Like on any debate over online dating, education, friendship, etc., there is also this debate about online therapy. How is it possible under such a virtual atmosphere.
I think that this is not an ethical question. Rather, this has something to do with our current reality tunnel and habits. It's like the fact that people didn't build ships out of metal until nearly 17th century, not because they couldn't but because they don't 'believe' that metal ships could float. They thought that metal would sink anyway. We have the same reasoning here. Our resistance to the idea of online practices is not related to ethics but it is highly affected by our belief systems.
Legal concerns are about evaluating great failures of therapists. Questions arise about control and detection of misbehaving therapists. But again, what is the difference here between an online therapy and a face to face therapy? Any stupid person like me can have a clinical psychology degree and get to practice online or offline. Who is going to control? Who is really controlling therapists right now? How do we know what is happening in the sacred tower of privacy? This has nothing to do with online concerns either.
In practice, body language and several physical factors like tone of voice, etc. can be of very valuable information for a therapist. This is another contra argument for online counseling and online psychotherapy. However, we are in a time where we can establish audio-visual communication over the net. If an online therapist is able to provide such technical setting, this can be set up by the client side too.
So, you see that although there may be something lacking in online therapy, there can be also added values of it. Of course, this is going to be discussed for years. It's a hot topic and it also reminds me of Max Planck's quote. I have posted it a while ago here but I am going to note down again:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
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