An analysis of the demands and behavioral patterns of psychological counseling clients in the days of digitalization

Abstract

Digitalization of social and work life has radically changed labor and interpersonal communications of labor subjects. This affects the occurrence of psychological problems and experiences with which individuals come to seek psychological help. The relevance of this study is determined by the importance of understanding the problems currently faced by psychological counseling (PC) clients who live and work closely with digital technologies, their expectations and individual mental characteristics. The purpose of this study is to analyze the individual characteristics and problems that labor subjects working with digital technologies are currently seeking help with from psychologists. It is shown that digitalization has led to a clear upward trend in the number of clients with anxiety and other stressful conditions, experiences of social and professional maladjustment or signs of burnout syndrome. These phenomena can be considered as a psychological cost of adaptation to one’s professional activity amidst social turbulence and digitalization. An analysis of requests from PC customers of different generations showed that they all face a number of problems related to the need to adapt to new conditions of labor relations and life, their digitalization and experience of new socio-psychological and technoconstant ‘deadline stresses’ at work, difficulties in building effective relationships with colleagues, managers or customers, problems with maintaining psychological stability, stresses of moral choice caused by delegating responsibility to digital technologies and other issues of professional well-being and safety.We believe that one of the reasons for changes in customers’ requests and their verbal behavior during consulting lies in digitalization, dependence on it and related socio-cultural changes, technological transformations of social and business life, and accelerated pace of life. Observations derived from the psychological counseling practice and a review of studies by other indicate significant changes in the psychological profile and behavior of modern clients, which, in turn, affect their psychological counseling requests. This raises theoretical and methodological questions about the development of new counseling technologies based on the integrative psychological counseling approach.