Professional Confidentiality

Psychotherapy is legislated by professional confidentiality regulations.This means that everything that a therapist does as part of his professional work with a patient and in the course of this process, learns about their environment may not be communicated without the patient’s consent.

This duty to maintain confidentiality is a professional ethical commitment in the sense of professional association membership, as well as for other activities like counselling, supervision and coaching, in other words in all professional relationships based on trust.

Extract out of the ASP Regulations

Psychotherapists who are members of the ASP are required to maintain confidentiality with respect to everything that is confided to them in. In particular the following applies:

Should an ASP psychotherapist be obligated in terms of statutory regulations to provide authorities or a court of law with a case report, the patient concerned, is fully informed of this. In principle is the reporting only done with written permission.

Patients are briefed, i.e. their permission is obtained when reporting to doctors working for insurances purposes (in particular medical aids), and school authorities etc. need to be made.

Using material from an actual therapy for training, publication or research purposes requires the patients consent otherwise is not allowed, unless no inferences can be made with regard to the identity of the person concerned or when there is no disadvantage.

ASP psychotherapists commit themselves to actively safeguarding data and take the necessary precautions with data protection in the case of illness, accidents and death.


In every case the ASP psychotherapists in protecting professional secrecy and in particularly in the handling exceptions are duty bound by maximum amount of diligence in order to protect the patient.