Malaysia is calling out to their public institutions of higher learning to address the country’s shortage of counsellors.

Currently there are 2000 students who graduate from counselling programs a year from the nations 12 institutions but the country only has a mere 1865 counsellors for a total population of 25 million. These counsellors come from various sectors – Government, private, academic, teaching and non profit organizations

“We can’t deny the importance of counselling and we are looking at the effectiveness of counselling programmes at these institutions” Said Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin at the 2009 National Counselling Conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Mohamed Khaled has suggested that employers should provide mental health insurance for their workers from private practitioners as burnout and other stress-related issues are common in the workplace.

Counsellors face several common issues which include sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse, rape and teenage angst.

It has been recommended that counsellor to student ratios at schools should be 1:500, 1:10,000 for career and vocation and 1:5,000 for crisis counselling and 1:2,500 for family and marriage counselling.