UKZN’s Counselling Psychology programme nurtures psychologists who accompany people through life’s transitions, challenges, and aspirations. Grounded in a Community Psychology ethos, this programme fosters practitioners who are skilled clinicians, change-makers and companions in healing, particularly within historically oppressed and structurally excluded communities. At the Master’s level, students are trained to offer culturally resonant, evidence-based psychological services that reflect the lived realities of people navigating grief, relationship trauma, career uncertainty, intergenerational struggle, addiction, and chronic stress. Emphasis is placed on brief interventions, resilience building, and trauma-informed care that uphold dignity, agency, and contextual sensitivity. Students work in university clinics, schools, community-based NGOs, public health settings, and private practice, offering services to individuals and groups. Training includes exploration of African worldviews, indigenous knowledge systems, and alternative therapeutic models that better reflect the needs of the populations they serve.

Graduates register with the HPCSA as Counselling Psychologists and are equipped to counsel and rethink counselling as a relational, justice-oriented, decolonial practice. Students can pursue a PhD after completing their master’s degree.

Students complete a defined sequence of core modules, a dissertation, and a full-year internship. The following modules are on offer:

Year 1

• Psychological Interventions: African and Global Approaches (16C)
• Psychology of Personality & Abnormal Behaviour (16C)
• Assessment in Psychological Practice (16C)
• Community Interventions in Professional Psychology (16C)
• Theory & Practice of Counselling Psychology (32C)
• Research Methods in Psychology (16C)

Year 1 and 2: Short Dissertation: Counselling Psychology (96C)

Year 2: Internship Module (Non-Credit Bearing)