ABSTRACT
Therapy takes exactly the length of time allocated for it. When the therapist and client expect change to happen, it often does. In this chapter, the author helps a student counselling service in a UK university to adopt a single-session therapy. Originally this service decided to offer all students 12 sessions of counselling. This resulted in a very long waiting list for those wishing to use the service as clients tended to utilise all their sessions because they felt that they were entitled to them. Initially, there was outrage that the number of counselling sessions had been reduced, but things settled down once a new group of incoming students came to expect to have six sessions of counselling rather than the previous allocation of 12 sessions. The service then took the bold step of offering students a single session for an hour booked on a session-by-session basis.
