The phrase ‘I’m seeing my therapist’ has taken on a whole new meaning with the launch of a new Skype counselling service. Mootu – www.mootu.com – is a national network of UK-based professional counsellors who offer one-to-one, face-to-face counselling to clients in the comfort of their own home via Skype video.

Mootu’s search engine can help those looking for a counsellor to find one with specific training or experience, and videos produced by each counsellor provide an opportunity to see how you feel about them.

‘Mootu enables you to book an initial appointment with two or three counsellors to see how it feels to talk to them in person using Skype,’ says dot com entrepreneur John Witney, himself a practising counsellor and BACP member.

Witney says that counselling via Skype has a number of clear advantages. Firstly, your choice of counsellor is not limited by your location and secondly there is no need to travel to visit your therapist every week. He also argues that some people may feel more comfortable talking to counsellors who do not have any connections with their local area and who they are unlikely to bump into in the high street. Witney was co-founder of ‘Jobserve’, the world’s first internet recruitment service in the early 1990s.

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