Graduate Diploma in Counselling and Psychotherapy

The Graduate Diploma in Counselling and Psychotherapy teaches you to support others through emotional, mental or life struggles, and to help people understand, manage and resolve issues affecting their life and wellbeing.
The curriculum develops your psychotherapy skills and deepens your knowledge of the key theories, issues and ethical implications in counselling. You explore attachment, therapeutic relationships and grief, and study key therapies including Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy, available as an elective.
Learning is hands-on: you conduct counselling sessions with peers and a surrogate client, and deepen your skills through real counselling opportunities and case studies. Teaching is by academics with professional counselling experience.
Elective courses let you shape the diploma around your career aspirations.
In one year of study the diploma qualifies you to pursue a career as a counsellor or psychotherapist, guiding individuals through common life stressors, and the qualification can be continued into a master's degree.
The program is 48 units — 42 units of core courses and 6 units of electives — taken full time over one year at the Adelaide City Campus, with a February intake.