What quality makes a counselor truly great? Is it empathy, or the ability to work out a client's issue and develop a personalized course of treatment? Advocacy, where a counselor tirelessly works on the side of the client? Or perhaps flexibility, and the understanding and awareness of a client's boundaries? Inevitably, all of these are essential to good counseling practice, and it's through a thorough course of counselor education and supervision that students are not only able to cultivate them, but gain mastery.

Upon entry into a program, most graduate-level counseling students will start with the basics: study via book work, case studies, journal articles, and educational videos linked to introductory courses in Guidance, Career Development, and Professional Issues, as well as more specific course tracts such as Substance Abuse Intervention and Child Development. Paired with skill development exercises, these are theory-heavy components of counselor education and supervision.

More advanced students will begin to practice their counseling skills through role-play. During role-play, one student acts as the counselor while another student acts as a client – both roles are necessary for a comprehensive educational experience as the students experience both sides of the counseling practice. Counselor education and supervision standards see that the "client" receives visual prompts during the mock session (or is given a scenario or script beforehand) and is expected to present a certain set of issues or symptoms, while the student "counselor" interacts with the student "client" and is assessed based on technique, rapport, and communication skill. The students provide feedback to one another, and the departmental faculty or administrators assess and score the students' performance. When the session is recorded, the students also have the opportunity to review their work and pick out specific areas for improvement.

It isn't until students are nearing the end of their degree program that they see actual clients. By that point, they're better able to display empathy, advocacy, and flexibility, and the client will benefit from quality treatment for a free or reduced fee. Review and assessment through counselor education and supervision will have prepared the student to work with a diverse client base in need of specialized treatment.

Counseling is a calling, but counseling practice is learned. Students achieve success through the tutelage of excellent faculty members and a strong counselor education and supervision curriculum. Even students' most inherent, intuitive qualities must be cultivated before they can become great counselors.

Barbeques, sunscreen, and freshly mowed lawns: the signs of summer are everywhere. And for millions of K-12 students across the country, class is almost out. Here are some ideas for school counselors and professionals who have graduated with a degree in school counseling education to see students through the summer months, from health and wellness to community involvement, and make sure they get off to the right start come fall.

Physical activity is excellent for mental health. It boosts energy levels, improves self-confidence, helps ease stress, and encourages focus and motivation – crucial drivers for academic and social success. And getting healthy amounts of Vitamin D from sun exposure can even lessen the symptoms of depression. Counselors and faculty involved in school counseling education can encourage students to enroll in summer sports, sign up for hiking or urban exploration groups, or simply get outside for daily bike rides or walks. These activities will help to keep students active, and may even present a good social outlet.

Counselors empowered through a degree program in school counseling education can also help students find ways to be active in their communities. Clubs and groups are popular among middle and high school-aged students, and there's no reason the same level of engagement has to end when the school year does: organizations such as Amnesty International and Habitat for Humanity often host meetings aimed to specifically encourage student participation. Also, townships and community offices may offer opportunities for students to help in and around their communities. Students can take part in local highway cleanups, tree planting events, and offer tutoring and mentorship services to their peers. Not only will summertime volunteer work make students feel great for participating in community improvement, but it will also be a good addition to their college applications and employment resumes.

Before the end of the current school year, highly motivated students can work with school counseling education professionals to develop a summer study plan. Beyond the required summer reading, students may want to begin preparing for standardized tests and college entrance examinations; review materials for advanced placement (AP) courses; or find appropriate internships. Such activities will give them a jump start on the next semester, and keep their minds active to avoid the summer slump.

An excellent school counseling education program will develop counselors' ability to help students make good choices, during the academic year and after it. Positive counseling techniques are essential for students' mental health, and can inspire students to do great things for themselves and others around them. Even during the "dog days," it's a win-win scenario.

Use of an avatar can help treat patients with schizophrenia who hear voices, a UK study suggests. The trial, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, focused on patients who had not responded to medication. Using customised computer software, the patients created avatars to match the voices they had been hearing. After up to six therapy sessions most patients said their voice had improved. Three said it had stopped entirely.

The study was led by psychiatrist emeritus professor Julian Leff, who spoke to patients through their on-screen avatars in therapy sessions. Gradually he coached patients to stand up to their voices.

"I encourage the patient saying, 'you mustn't put up with this, you must tell the avatar that what he or she is saying is nonsense, you don't believe these things, he or she must go away, leave you alone, you don't need this kind of torment'," said Prof Leff.

"The avatar gradually changes to saying, 'all right I'll leave you alone, I can see I've made your life a misery, how can I help you?' And then begins to encourage them to do things that would actually improve their life."

By the end of their treatment, patients reported that they heard the voices less often and that they were less distressed by them. Levels of depression and suicidal thoughts also decreased, a particularly relevant outcome-measure in a patient group where one in 10 will attempt suicide.

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Imagine two women standing in front of a mirror. The first one has the following thoughts: “I can’t stand the way I look. I’m so fat.” She feels anxious, insecure and depressed. The other woman says to herself, “I’ve gained a few pounds, but it’s not the end of the world. I can relax and start eating better next week.” She feels calm and accepting of herself.

The scenario is the same for both women, but their interpretation of it is significantly different because of one thing — their self-talk.

What we say to ourselves has a powerful impact on our emotional state. That’s why teaching clients to notice their self-talk is such an important part of therapy. Today more than ever, attachment- and mindfulness-based therapies are helping clients experience emotional healing. Drawing from mindfulness therapy, I coined the term “the art of noticing.”

Noticing helps clients pay attention to their internal monologues and understand how their negative inferences affect their emotional states. Noticing is particularly helpful when working with clients who experience anxiety, depression and eating disorders because these clients are especially prone to negative self-talk. Because self-talk is so automatic, it is easy to dismiss its effect on clients’ moods and belief systems, but noticing is a first step in helping clients to:

• Recognize cognitive distortions
• Slow down their thinking
• Take note of negative internal monologues
• Identify and pay attention to triggers
• Practice a nonjudgmental stance
• Use effective counterstatements

The voice
According to Edmund Bourne, a clinical psychologist who has written best-selling anxiety workbooks, each of us has a personality subtype that contributes to our mental health distress. This negative “voice” falls into the following four categories:

• The worrier
• The perfectionist
• The critic
• The victim

Each of these subtypes perpetuates negative self-talk. Our job as counselors is to help clients recognize and change those negative internal monologues by replacing them with positive counterstatements.

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Modern veterinary science is a technically advanced field. Some animals receive not just X-rays but sophisticated scans such as MRIs. If you visit a large veterinary hospital you will find cats getting chemotherapy and dogs on the receiving end of complicated surgeries.

Naturally, a lot of the training vet students receive is focused on the “hard science” parts of what they will do as practicing veterinarians. But there’s also a softer side to veterinary medicine that’s increasingly being recognized where vet students are trained. I learned about it from Dr. Kathy Ruby, a licensed counselor who works for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University.

“I teach a class for vet students called ‘Pet Loss and Human Bereavement,’ ” Ruby said. “Veterinary science training is great on the medical side. It’s my job to concentrate on the other end of the leash.”

In the old days, vets mostly dealt with livestock like cows and pigs. These so-called large animals didn’t inspire close bonds with their human owners. But now many of us deeply care about the smaller animals that live in our houses. Our cats don’t just live in the barn catching mice, but spend their days in our homes. Dogs sleep at the foot of our beds or even between the sheets.

“In some ways we now have what you could call interspecies families,” Ruby said. “That’s wonderful, but it also makes for great challenges when our pets reach the end of their lives.”

It’s a simple fact that we generally outlive the animals in our homes. That means we are often quite involved in an animal’s decline. And at the end we may face decisions including euthanasia.

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Becoming a certified professional counselor is no easy task. Classwork, fieldwork, research, employment, and beyond: learners enrolled in graduate counseling programs have a lot to think about as they pursue a degree. To find true success, it's essential that a learner seek out a reliable mentor early on in the education process. From navigating the selection of courses offered by the program, to choosing professors, fields of study, and even specialties, a mentor will help the counseling learner map out a personalized game plan.

The ability to mentor is integral to being a counselor. The benefits of mentoring for learners in graduate counseling programs may include academic support, social guidance, and honest feedback. A mentor can serve as a sounding board to a learner: what research topics best fit the learner's interest? What options are there for field of study? And what are the learner's hopes for employment? Mentors may also introduce learners to networking opportunities, and provide guidance for how best to pursue licensure.

Some graduate counseling programs have official mentor-learner pools and set guidelines for effective, ethical associations with appropriate power differentials. Other programs encourage learners to select a mentor more informally. If a learner feels she has good rapport with a particular professor, faculty member, or advisor, or has worked well with a field counselor, she may simply ask to be mentored. It's also not uncommon for a mentor to offer services to a learner. Ultimately, the strength of the mentor-learner relationship is based on trust, honesty, and active communication.

How can a professional counselor become a mentor? Many are employed as faculty and adjuncts within graduate counseling programs and work with the learners on their campuses. Some private practitioners, school counselors, and clinical or rehabilitative counselors employed by mental health wards and hospitals may also offer their services as mentors. Having recent, relevant experience in a specialized field, these professionals may offer particularly good insight to counseling learners. Counselors may also moderate online forums or listservs, run a roundtable session at a regional or national counseling conference, and join professional organizations to advocate the counseling profession and the roll of counselor/counseling learner mentorship. Such organizations may offer liaison services to match a learner with an appropriate mentor beyond the boundaries of a single campus.

The cycle then continues. After successfully receiving degrees from graduate counseling programs, many new counselors become mentors themselves. Knowing firsthand what it takes to become a counselor, they provide ample encouragement and support where it's needed most.

The ACA Center for Counseling Practice, Policy, and Research was developed to create, archive, disseminate and promote exemplary counseling practice information and resources for professional counselors, counselor educators, supervisors, students, legislators, the media and other consumers of applied counseling knowledge and to advocate for optimum counselor work and training conditions.

The vision of the ACA Center is to be seen as both the premier place to obtain information and resources that focus on cutting edge practices and to be viewed as the focus of the counseling profession’s advocacy efforts for high quality workforce conditions. Please provide us feedback for additional services you would like to see and for the ACA Center’s continuous improvement.

PRACTICE BRIEFS: The ACA Center for Counseling Practice, Policy, and Research is proud to introduce a NEW service for its ACA members: ACA Practice Briefs Project. The underlying goal of this project is to identify and solicit knowledgeable and skilled scholars in the counseling profession to construct brief, written, research-based summaries of what we, in the counseling profession, know works (e.g., best practices, evidence-based practices, and research-based approaches) related to a wide variety client presenting issues and counseling topics/issues. Each written brief is several pages in length, and each brief includes references.

Visit the site here.

The New Jersey Department of Human Services is receiving $11.5 million to help families still shell-shocked by Hurricane Sandy to cope with the disaster, New Jersey’s two U.S. senators announced today.

The money, provided by the federal Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program, will fund social services such as crisis counseling, educational programs and connections to other resources.

“This federal funding will help provide important social services to families and children as they continue to get their lives back on track,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ).

The Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program, part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, provides services that focus on preventing and mitigating the emotional fallout of a disaster like Sandy – services that often are provided in shelters, community centers or churches.

“This funding helps meet some of the costs incurred with making counseling available following Superstorm Sandy, and providing people with the help they needed to move forward to a better and stronger future,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

Source.

The Texas Tech Student Counseling Center is serving more students than ever before as part of a larger, rising national trend among other universities.

According to a study completed by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, the number of psychological problems in college campuses has increased, along with counseling attendance because of symptoms such as anxiety and depression. Anxiety levels have risen during the past six years, the study reported. In 2006, 34 percent of students using counseling centers cited anxiety, the study showed. By 2012, it had risen to 42 percent. Depression dropped slightly during that time, from 39 percent to 36 percent, the study reported. The study was collected from the opinions of 400 counseling center directors, the report stated, some of whom are concerned about the growing numbers, while others see it as a good sign.

Richard Lenox, the associate director and coordinator of clinical services at the Student Counseling Center, said he has seen a rise in students coming to the center for counseling. It does not necessarily reflect an increase in psychological problems though, he said, but instead a decrease in the stigma of looking for help.

“I think one of the primary reasons is that there’s less and less stigma about seeking counseling services each year,” Lenox said. The lessened stigma can be attributed to many things, he said, including a better general education about mental illnesses and a greater

visibility in the media. College students also are more likely to seek help than older generations, he said.   

A majority of Tech students coming into the center are reporting problems with anxiety and depression. “Of course,” Lenox said, “once we get them in the door there could be a lot of other things that’s going on, too, but in terms of what they say they’re coming in for, anxiety and depression are the primary reasons that are bringing people in.”

Lisa Viator, the assistant director and a staff psychologist at the center, said the fact students are seeking counseling for things such as anxiety proves the legitimacy and need for counseling services on campus.

“I think we definitely have seen more folks with anxiety initiating services here,” she said, “and I think what that says is that people really need that safe spot or that safe place to really learn how to calm themselves and stop their minds from racing, and feel a little bit more in control, a little bit more hopeful, less catastrophic about things.”

Some common symptoms of anxiety include a racing mind, increased worry, a need for control of everything and insomnia, or what Viator calls the “hamster wheel of the mind.”

“A lot of people will talk about not being able to sleep at night, or fall asleep,” she said, “because when the lights are out and finally it’s quiet, that’s when the mind starts racing.”

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It was a typical week for me: I received e-mail notes from faculty at other institutions, describing the challenges as they try to respond to troubled students. Even when faculty receive support from their department chairs and deans, dealing with those students can take dozens of hours, sap their energy, and, in some cases, terrify them.

It was a depressingly familiar week in another way: an attack at a campus of Lone Star Community College, in Texas. This time the weapon of choice was a knife. The suspect, a student at the college, injured 14, two critically, before being apprehended.

Six days after that came the Boston Marathon bombings. On the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth campus, FBI investigators later found a "large pyrotechnic" in the dorm room of the 19-year-old suspect in the bombings, once again demonstrating the vulnerability of college campuses and the ease with which students can bring weapons onto them.

Now, six years after the attack at Virginia Tech, and four months after the heartbreaking carnage at Sandy Hook, the country is at last waking up to the idea that we have a recurring problem. Inspired by the courageous families of victims, state legislatures in Connecticut, New York, and Maryland have passed much tougher gun-control laws, although even modest gun-control legislation has failed to pass at the federal level.

On another front, funds have been set aside for mental health. Last month Congress approved $2.75-million for a new National Center for Campus Public Safety, which will provide research, training, and best practices to colleges.

Those are important steps in the right direction. But six years after the worst campus attack in American history, are classrooms really less vulnerable?

I imagine what would happen were Seung-Hui Cho to enter my office at Virginia Tech today exhibiting the same behavior and affect, and writing the same angry poems as he did in 2005. He would be wearing his sunglasses indoors, his baseball cap pulled low over his head. He would speak in a whisper.

It would still be difficult to obtain long-term help for him. This isn't because support personnel and administrators at Virginia Tech would be unresponsive. In fact, even in 2005, when the English department reported Cho to the counseling center and various campus authorities, almost all those we spoke with did their best to be helpful.

These days we do have more resources than before: a threat-assessment team, whose members include law enforcement and mental-health professionals; a better-staffed campus counseling center—although, like most such centers, it is still expected to do far too much with far too little. (There is roughly one counselor for every 1,750 students at Virginia Tech. When the English department reported Cho, the ratio was 1 to 2,700. Experts recommend that the ratio of counselors to students be 1 to 1,500.)

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