Chat-counseling in a crisis psychological service for teenagers
The possibilities, limitations and difficulties of remote forms of providing psychological assistance by means of the Internet are discussed. The factors of stimulating the digitalization of psychological practice are identified: technological, economic, temporal, spatial, and psychological. Examples of counseling and psychotherapeutic practice are shown when working with various client requests: in career guidance, grief therapy, mental and psychosomatic disorders. Special attention is paid to the format of remote chat-counseling on the example of the work of the crisis psychological counseling of adolescents and youth of the Charity Fund "Your Territory". For subscribers, such assistance is free and anonymous, is carried out in real time, is provided in crisis situations of violence, abuse, bereavement, as well as in general requests for self-knowledge and building productive relationships with people. Among the advantages of a chat contact are the willingness of subscribers to self-disclosure in conditions of anonymity, the minimality of barriers to communication (social, age, gender); the low threshold of requirements in the communicative competence of subscribers; the optimal format of communication for people with speech and hearing problems. It is emphasized that in the absence of visual and auditory information about the subscriber, the psychologist focuses on the possibilities of analyzing his written statements, including text parameters that can be a source of additional information about the state and personality of the subscriber: style, composition, structure, logic, sequence of presentation, emoji symbols, punctuation marks. An empirical study of the effectiveness of chat counseling was carried out on the material of content analysis of 51 crisis-type chat dialogues with subscribers of the psychological assistance service "Your Territory". A comparative analysis of the subscriber's state in the initial and final parts of the dialogue in 36 categories showed productive changes (statistically significant in 21 categories) in the direction of reducing the frequency of negative emotions, the predominance of calmly neutral emotional reactions, and the formation of the subscriber's readiness to find constructive ways to cope with the situation and ways to resolve it. The positive dynamics of the subscribers ' emotional state from the beginning to the end of the chat dialogue in the process of online counseling is empirically shown.