Current situations and problems of software counselling

There are two major contemporary counseling paradigms in the human mental health area, i.e., the client-centered approach and the cognitive-behavioral approach. Both have been adapted to software counseling. Though the former was unsuccessful, the latter has been obtaining generally good results. The client-centered approach seeks to construct an empathic relationship through open dialogue, which is difficult to realize in a computer program. On the other hand, the cognitive-behavioral approach involves systematic instructions using a binary logic. It is programmable and suitable for an expert system. Computer-assisted counseling has some advantages compared with traditional human counseling, e.g., it is cost-effective and highly accessible, but a computer cannot replace the human clinician totally, because total clinical judgments must be generated by unformulizable human skills. Computers can only handle some stages of the whole counseling process as assistants.