Introduction to Consultation

Abstract

We begin with psychiatrist Gerald Caplan’s definition of consultation, not because it is the best definition for our purposes, but rather because it provides a starting point, both historically and conceptually, from which to view the role of the school consultant. Historically speaking, perhaps the earliest systematic approach to human services consultation began in 1949 in Israel where Caplan and his small clinical staff were assigned the challenging task of attending to the mental health needs of 16,000 adolescent immigrants. Complicating this assignment were the facts that these adolescents were housed at more than 100 residential institutions, transportation within the country was often problematic, and there were about 1,000 initial requests for assistance. In confronting these obstacles to the traditional model of referral/diagnosis/psychotherapy of individual clients, Caplan reasoned that available professional resources would need to be used more effectively (Caplan, 1970).

Consultation... denote[s] the process of interaction between two professional persons—the consultant, who is a specialist, and the consultee, who invokes his help in regard to a current work problem with which the latter is having some difficulty, and which he has decided is within the former’s area of specialized competence. The work problem involves the management or treatment of one or more clients of the consultee, or the planning or implementation of a program to cater to such clients. (Caplan, 1963, p. 470)