The master's thesis handles the work of counsellors in psychosocial counselling offices at Faculties of Education in Slovenia during the COVID-19 epidemic. The purpose of the master's thesis is to contribute to an in-depth insight into experiencing work in the mentioned counselling offices during the COVID-19 epidemic. I wanted to find out whether the interviewees faced distress themselves and how did they take care of themselves and their mental health during the enforced measures due to the COVID-19 epidemic.
The theoretical part consists of the clarification of the terms pandemic and epidemic and their consequences for mental health, the determination of the terms counselling, psychotherapy and psychosocial counselling and the description of the role of a counsellor, an advisee and their relationship in counselling. Since the helping professions require a great amount of empathy, an individual can start to feel very emotionally strained after a certain period of time, therefore it is vital to find a way which helps them to ease those strains. Some find relief in sports activities, others in reading professional literature or in various relaxation techniques and there are also some who find greatest relief in various support groups. With the help of literature I thus researched in the third chapter when the strain and burnout arises with counsellors and what role do the supervision and intervision play in the work of counsellors and what are the other means of taking care of themselves and their physical and mental well-being. In the last chapter I focused on counselling during the COVID-19 epidemic.
The empirical part consists of a qualitative research executed with partially structured interviews. The sample included 5 counsellor who work in student (psycho)counselling offices at Faculty of Education in Ljubljana, Faculty of Education in Maribor and Faculty of Education in Primorska. With the help of five interviews I researched what challenges the counsellors were facing in their work during the epidemic and what changes they detected in the process of counselling during the epidemic, which support groups offered them help in that time, why they were on the verge of burnout and how they took care of themselves and their mental health during the epidemic.
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