American Counseling Association Code of Ethics Quiz

The Counseling Relationship

• Counselors facilitate client growth and development, fostering the interest and welfare of clients, and promoting formation of healthy relationships.
• The primary responsibility of counselors is to respect the dignity and promote the welfare of clients.
• Counselors create, safeguard, and maintain documentation necessary for rendering professional services.
• Counselors and their clients work jointly in devising counseling plans that offer reasonable promise of success and are consistent with the abilities, temperament, developmental level, and circumstances of clients.
• Counselors recognize the importance of support networks and consider enlisting the support, understanding, and involvement of others as positive resources, when appropriate, with client consent.

Informed Consent in the Counseling Relationship

• Clients have the freedom to choose whether to enter into or remain in a counseling relationship and need adequate information about the counseling process and the counselor.
• Counselors explicitly explain to clients the nature of all services provided.
• Counselors communicate information in ways that are both developmentally and culturally appropriate.
• When counseling minors, incapacitated adults, or other persons unable to give voluntary consent, counselors seek the assent of clients to services and include them in decision making as appropriate.
• Counselors discuss the required limitations to confidentiality when working with clients who have been mandated for counseling services.

Clients Served by Others

• Counselors request release from clients to inform the other professionals and strive to establish positive and collaborative professional relationships when they learn that their clients are in a professional relationship with other mental health professionals.

Avoiding Harm and Imposing Values

• Counselors act to avoid harming their clients, trainees, and research participants and to minimize or to remedy unavoidable or unanticipated harm.
• Counselors are aware of—and avoid imposing—their own values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Prohibited Non-counseling Roles and Relationships

• Sexual and/or romantic counselor–client interactions or relationships with current clients, their romantic partners, or their family members are prohibited.
• Counselors are prohibited from engaging in counseling relationships with persons with whom they have had a previous sexual and/or romantic relationship.
• Sexual and/or romantic counselor–client interactions or relationships with former clients, their romantic partners, or their family members are prohibited for a period of 5 years following the last professional contact.