Bartering in Psychotherapy: Ethical Considerations

Fulfills Requirement: Professional Ethics for all professions. Check with your state board if you have questions.

This intermediate-level course explores the complexities of bartering in the context of boundary crossings and dual relationships in psychotherapy. The course maps types of bartering (i.e. goods, services), discusses the relationships between and definitions of bartering, boundary crossing and dual relationships, explores the applications to poor clients and to those from different cultures, provides bartering vignettes, reviews the ethics codes on bartering, outlines the objections to bartering and offers clinical and ethical guidelines for employing, specifically, bartering and, more generally, boundary crossing and dual relationships.

The course consists of three articles with both audio and text versions. In the first article, Dr. Zur discusses clinical cases in which bartering served the therapeutic process and provides warnings regarding when it might not be appropriate. The second article by J. Lawrence Thomas, further discusses the complexities and rationale for bartering. In the final article, Dr. Zur reviews types of bartering and further discusses boundaries concerns as they apply to bartering for services. Additional references are provided for further study, but they are not part of the course.