The Next Step

If you have reached the point in your life when you have decided to explore counselling and you are reading these pages with a view to taking that first step and making contact with us, please do get in touch.

As we do not have a designated office space, your call or text will be made to an unmanned mobile telephone held by a member of Contact Counselling.  It will be necessary to leave a message.  Messages are checked two to three times per week and so there may be a short delay in us responding to your initial enquiry.  

IMPORTANT!

Please state whether it is safe for us to leave a message either on your voicemail or with a third party, should they have access to your telephone.  If you have arranged for someone else to answer your telephone on your behalf, unless you advise us that it is safe for us to leave a message with them, we shall not be able to do so. If you do not answer after three attempts to contact you, we shall destroy your contact information.  We advise you, therefore, to store our telephone number so that you recognise it and answer it when we ring.  If we are able to leave a message but should you not return our call promptly, we shall move on to the next person on the list. 

We shall need to take some basic information in order to complete your referral.  Please provide us with your availability (the more flexible you are, the greater your chance of seeing a counsellor more quickly) confirmation that you are registered with a GP, if you are adopted (please see page 1 of this website for information about counselling and adoption), your preferred location or method of counselling sessions and a brief outline of the issues you will bring to counselling and any other requirements you may have. 

Your name shall be placed on our waiting list and we will contact you again when a counsellor’s availability matches yours.  Due to our affordability and the inevitable length of the list, you may find that the time you spend on the list is quite lengthy.  Should you require immediate counselling, we suggest that you seek an alternative service (see mhguide@sheffieldflourish.co.uk) or a different counsellor in private practice.  Once a counsellor becomes available, you will be contacted with a view to starting the following week, taking the slot which has become available.  Should you not be able to start immediately, we will not be able to hold the slot until such time that you are, as there are other individuals on the list who are keen to start counselling as soon as possible.  

Our strict policy is that we see clients in the order that they join the waiting list.  As we offer open-ended counselling and can not anticipate how long clients will remain in therapy, we are unable to give any indication as to how long you may be waiting to see a counsellor.

Should you decide at any point that you no longer wish to remain on our list, please contact us to remove your name. We, sometimes, have to close our list due to high demand.  If your name remains on our list when you no longer require our service, this might impede the opportunity for someone else, who does require our service, to add their name to it.