Examining dropout in psychological counseling from the perspectives of both clients and candidate counselors

The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons for early withdrawal of the sessions in the counseling services carried out by the undergraduate students of Psychological Counseling and Guidance in the spring term of 2018-2019. In this study, the reasons why the counseling sessions with university students were dropped out early in the level of undergraduate counseling were examined in terms of both the counselors and prospective counselors. In the spring, when a total of 233 counselors received psychological counseling, 142 clients agreed to participate and 27 clients discontinued counseling early. In this study, which was conducted with a qualitative research design, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 10 clients who discontinued counseling early and 10 candidate counselors. As a result of content analysis used in data analysis, a total of seven themes were obtained; 1) deciding to get help, 2) access to help resources and selection of psychological counselor, 3) expectations and satisfaction from psychological counseling, 4) early withdrawal of counseling, 5) the effect of early withdrawal to the client and the candidate counselor, 6) factors that may prevent early withdrawal, 7) psychological help services provided on campus. During the process in which the clients themselves decided to receive psychological help, the counselors found the counseling to be easily accessible. Half of the clients identified gender as an important condition in the selection of psychological candidate counselors. It was seen that the clients who did not receive psychological help before were more concerned about how the sessions would proceed and what their roles would be. Clients often cited their dissatisfaction with psychological counseling as the reason for not attending the sessions, but did not state this during the sessions. Candidate counselors pointed out the factors originating from the counselor among the reasons of early withdrawing.