EDMONTON — Lawrence Murphy remembers the woman who needed psychological counselling but could not face a counsellor.

Her husband had cheated on her, but that was years ago. Ancient history. But now she'd caught him eyeballing naked women on the Internet, and she was going to pieces.

"She couldn't look a counsellor in the eye and discuss her feelings without screaming, crying and throwing things," recalled Murphy, senior counsellor for Therapy Online, from his office in Guelph, Ont.

She turned to his team, he said, corresponding and getting help through emails.

She would type for 10 minutes, sob, yell and run from the room only to return and start all over. Eventually, she realized the porn surfing was not the issue, merely a surrogate for unresolved shame, betrayal and rage over the adultery.

"That was one of those beautiful moments in counselling when you help a person understand their own experience and it transforms everything," said Murphy, whose company counsels clients in cyberspace from Guelph to Singapore and is part of a growing, and controversial, trend over the last decade.

"There is a tremendous amount of wariness out there (toward cyber-counselling), as there should be," said Faye Mishna, a social work professor with the University of Toronto.

"But it's out there and it's happening, so let's identify these issues and make sure people are aware."

Murphy is assisting Mishna and other researchers devise guidelines and best practices to navigate the ethical and regulatory minefields of online therapy and provide counselling to undergraduate students in a pilot project.

They are helping counsellors who interact with patients by email: how to look for tone and interpret word usage and emoticons, how to gain and maintain trust.

"(Cyber-counselling) has some potential benefit," said Mishna.

"If you can't make it to a counselling session or there's too much shame and stigma (to go face to face), it does provide access."

The challenges are myriad.

A counsellor licensed in Ontario e-counsels a patient in British Columbia. What regulatory body is the counsellor accountable to?

What about the possibility of hackers breaking into counselling records, or of courts subpoenaing entire transcripts of e-therapy sessions?

Karen Cohen, executive director of the Canadian Psychological Association, agreed the therapy could benefit those who would not walk into a counsellor's office.

The association, she said, is drafting guidelines for online counselling as it grapples with broad questions - such as, will this type of therapy benefit a certain client in a certain situation - as well as nuts and bolts issues, such as ensuring privacy and proper liability coverage for providers.

"As an association we're obviously concerned that whatever mental health provision is being undertaken, it's being done in as ethically and competently a way as possible," said Cohen.

While the process currently varies from counselling firm to firm, there are common threads: a pre-screen to make sure serious depression cases, anorexics, those suffering from distorted reality or suicidal thoughts get immediate face-to-face help.

Patients email over a certain period, but counsellors respond only at set times, like in a session.

Murphy, whose firm has counsellors across the country, says they've seen more men sign on for help. The relative anonymity allows males to escape the stigma of going to a clinic or looking another human being in the eye and saying, for example, they yell and swear at their children.

Robert Wilson, founder and CEO of Human Solutions -- an international provider of psychological counselling services for business -- says they've stepped up their cyber-counselling at the insistence of clients.

Such counselling used to be for shut-ins or those living in remote regions, but now clients in urban centres - especially younger people more comfortable with computer technology - want their help via the web, he said.

"It comes with many problems," Wilson said in an interview from the company's head office in Vancouver, adding it's not their preferred method.

"If everything is reduced to a written form of communication -- and an abbreviated one at that - it is far more stilted and at times not as easily communicated method of engaging in counselling."

Right now, he said, 10 per cent of the firm's counselling is online. He expects that figure to rise in lockstep with the proliferation of BlackBerrys, cellphones, text messaging, Facebooking and emailing.

"It's not surprising given the demographic."

"People are going to find that this method of communicating is so much a part of who they are" in future.