Phone therapy has existed for decades, but COVID-19 forced remote work into the mainstream almost overnight. That permanent shift shows up in legal frameworks, professional guidance, and client expectations. Clinicians can no longer treat remote work as a stopgap – it now demands genuine competence.
The eight books here reflect that shift from different angles: broad practical guides to videoconferencing generally and books built around a specific medium or population. Between them, they cover everything from the legal and technical basics to the specific interventions a clinician actually runs once the session is underway.
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A Practitioner’s Guide to Telemental Health: How to Conduct Legal, Ethical, and Evidence-Based Telepractice
David D. Luxton, Eve-Lynn Nelson & Marlene Maheu, American Psychological Association, 2023
Now in its second edition, this book was substantially updated to reflect the accelerated growth telemental health saw during and after COVID-19. It covers current best practices and evidence-based recommendations across the full range of telehealth applications: research, treatment delivery, assessment, psychoeducation, training, supervision, and consultation. It pays particular attention to the legal and ethical complications physical distance introduces, including how to manage a suicide risk assessment when the clinician can’t be in the room.
This is the most comprehensive and research-grounded general reference of the eight books here. It covers the whole field’s breadth rather than going deep on any single clinical use case.
A Mental Health Provider’s Guide to Telehealth: Providing Outpatient Videoconferencing Services
Jonathan G. Perle, Routledge, 2021
This book stays specifically practical. It opens by defining key terms like telehealth and telepsychology and covering the ethical and legal basics. From there, it moves into granular, often-overlooked technical details: computer systems, video camera and display screen choices, microphone quality, videoconferencing platform selection, bandwidth and latency, and how to set up a room properly. It also includes self-care practices for the therapist running sessions from home.
Recommended for clinicians ready to move past the basics and get the technical details of videoconferencing right.
Telemental Health: The Essential Guide to Providing Successful Online Therapy
Joni M. Gilbertson, PESI, 2020
Gilbertson walks through the entire virtual treatment process end to end, from intake through termination and beyond. She does it in a conversational style built around her own case examples and clinical decision-making, rather than dense research. The book covers what a successful online practice actually requires day to day — not just clinical technique but the practicalities of setting one up and running it.
This is the most accessible and book on this page. It’s aimed at both brand-new and seasoned therapists building or converting to an online practice.
Phone Therapy: A Guide for Practitioners Working with Voice Alone
Sarah Hart, Routledge, 2022
This book treats phone therapy as a medium in its own right rather than a lesser substitute for video or in-person work. It covers assessment, contracting, and core skills specific to voice-only sessions, alongside phone-specific issues like disinhibition, privacy, and how to work without visual cues. Contributing counsellors offer case studies showing how different theoretical orientations adapt to voice-only work, and chapters include self-reflection exercises.
This is the only book on this page built specifically around phone as its own medium, distinct from videoconferencing. Worth having on hand for the cases where voice alone genuinely fits better than video.
Phone Coaching in Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Alexander L. Chapman, Guilford, 2018
This is the first comprehensive guide to a specific, high-stakes piece of standard DBT treatment: the brief between-session phone call where a client reaches out for coaching on distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills in the moment. Chapman lays out the principles and goals of phone coaching, what limits a therapist should set, and how to structure a call’s beginning, middle, and end. She also covers how to manage suicide risk during a crisis call.
This book predates the whole videoconferencing-era framing of the other guides on this page. It’s about a specific telephone-based coaching contact that’s been part of standard DBT protocol since long before “telehealth” was a category.
Handbook of Online Systemic Therapy, Supervision, and Training: Practice and Research
Edited by Maria Borcsa & Valeria Pomini, Springer, 2025
This handbook covers digital systemic psychotherapy and counseling across individuals, couples, families, and groups, extending beyond direct clinical work into online supervision and training for telemental health services. That range reflects the dramatic changes the field saw once COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of systemic teletherapy and telecounseling. Contributors write from research and training programs across multiple countries, giving the handbook an international rather than single-country perspective.
This book is written specifically for systemic and family-therapy online practice. It’s also the only one on this page where supervision and training sit at the center alongside direct client work.
The Therapist’s Notebook for Systemic Teletherapy: Creative Interventions for Effective Online Therapy
Edited by Rebecca A. Cobb, Routledge, 2024
This guide
What happens to in-person therapeutic activities that don’t obviously work over video? This handbook answers that question directly, across forty chapters organized into seven parts.
Contributors provide step-by-step guidelines for adapting or inventing interventions across seven parts, covering both practical groundwork (setup, self-of-the-therapist work, training and supervision) and specific populations (children and adolescents, adults, intimate relationships, families). Each is grounded in established therapy models and evidence-based practice. Chapters cover niche topics such as telehealth family sculpts, virtual altar-making for grief and loss, and plurilinguistic virtual reflecting teams with Latino/a families.
This is the most activity – and technique – focused book on this page. It’s a resource to pull specific interventions from, rather than a guide to the legal, technical, or theoretical landscape of telehealth itself.
Teletherapy Toolkit: Therapist Handbook for Treating Children and Teens
Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, self-published, 2020
This book was written specifically for clinicians who, in the author’s words, “weren’t trained for this.”It collects theory-grounded therapeutic techniques and activities specifically adapted for delivering therapy to children and teens over video, addressing regulation, anxiety, mood, and behavioral issues. This is a population whose in-person therapy techniques weren’t originally designed to translate remotely.
Capanna-Hodge built the book directly from watching her own team of therapists struggle to find theory-grounded techniques they could actually use on video, rather than from research literature alone.
Every other book on this page treats children and teens as an afterthought at best; this is the only one built around them specifically.