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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Her hair is brown and tied back into a professional looking ponytail. She wears a blue shirt, tan sweater and delicate gold chain. It's the first time she's met the man sitting across from her, and she looks out at him, her eyes curious.

She is from L.A. She was created in Los Angeles and "lives out her life" there on a computer screen in a lab at the University of Southern California. She's not a real woman, but a virtual one, created to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Her makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize the way that mental healthcare is practiced in this country. Her name is Ellie.

The project that resulted in Ellie began almost two years ago at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. Two scientists in particular are responsible for her existence, a psychologist named Albert "Skip" Rizzo and a computer scientist named Louis-Philippe Morency.

Rizzo and Morency spent months laboring over every element of Ellie's presentation and interaction with patients, experimenting with a range of different personalities, outfits, and vocal mannerisms.

"Everything has been thought of," says Morency. For example when patients talk, Ellie encourages them to continue talking with a well timed, 'Uh-huh,' just as real people do.

"We have recorded more than 200 of these uh-huhs," Morency says. "And these are so powerful! Because a simple 'uh-huh' and a silence — if they are done the right way — can be extremely powerful. So we spent a lot of time on these little details."

But the most important thing about Ellie is not her skill at gently probing all the people her scientist brings into the lab to talk to her. Her real value, the reason she was built at all, is her skill at taking and analyzing thousands of measurements of those people.

Under the wide screen where Ellie's image sits there are three devices. A video camera tracks facial expressions of the person sitting opposite. A movement sensor — Microsoft Kinect — tracks the person's gestures, fidgeting and other movements. A microphone records every inflection and tone in his or her voice. The point, Rizzo explains, is to analyze in almost microscopic detail the way that people talk and move — to read their body language.

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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).

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More than 90% of pediatric specialists who diagnose and manage attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in preschoolers do not follow the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) clinical-treatment guidelines.

That’s the conclusion of researchers from the Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, which sent the Preschool ADHD Treatment Questionnaire to a random sample of 3,000 physicians who specialize in diagnosing and treating neurobehavioral conditions nationwide. The doctors reported on how often they recommended strategies such as training parents in behavioral management of ADHD, how often they relied on medication as a first- or second-line treatment, as well as which drugs they prescribed most often.

In 2011, the AAP released revised guidelines for diagnosing kids with ADHD. “Those guidelines were important in that they extended down from age 6 down to age 4. For the first time pediatricians were given guidance in how to approach the management of ADHD in preschoolers,” says the study’s lead author Dr. Andrew Adesman, the chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park.

Along with the expansion of the population that could be diagnosed with the condition came advice for how to treat the youngest patients. Adesman says, in general, pediatricians have been especially uncomfortable with diagnosing ADHD in very young children, so they have turned to medical specialists like child neurologists, child psychiatrists and developmental-behavior pediatricians to make the call. “When we undertook this study, we were interested in seeing what the specialists in the field were doing, since pediatricians turned to them and parents turned to them,” says Adesman. “Actually, the AAP in their guidelines specifically state that if a pediatrician is not comfortable with evaluating children — especially young children — for ADHD, then they should turn to these medical specialists.”

Currently, the AAP recommends that behavioral therapy should be the first type of treatment offered to preschoolers with ADHD, followed by medication only if the behavior interventions are unsuccessful.

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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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April is Counseling Awareness Month! What does that mean for the counseling profession? A spike in pro-counseling articles in the New York Times and Time, more online "likes" and "shares" of counseling-related infographics, and perhaps most importantly, the opportunity for counselors to increase public understanding: the work they do, the benefit they have on their communities, and the ways they have helped change – and will continue to change – society for the better. On campuses across the country, graduate programs in counselor education and supervision are opening their doors, encouraging faculty and learners to observe, learn, and spread the word.

Many people believe that when they're having mental or emotional problems, help isn't available, or is hard to come by. This may be especially true for college students who are already overburdened with the pressures of academia, social relationships, and what to do post-graduation.  But counselor education and supervision programs stress that help is at close hand. With on-campus Counseling Awareness Month themed events, counselors and counselors-in-training present research, work with students, and communicate the benefits of counseling.

Subsequent student guidance may be offered in an on-campus clinic run by the counselor education and supervision program. Free or discounted counseling sessions help students develop positive tactics for stress-relief, time management, and self-esteem building, and provide them with advice on how to deal with relationship issues. If a student is having alcohol or substance abuse problems, a counselor can recommend a route of treatment or refer for medical intervention.

The college newspaper is also be a good forum during Counseling Awareness Month. By running an editorial or column containing topical information and statistics, a counselor education and supervision program can expand its reach. This may be an opportunity to help rub out the stigma of mental illness: an estimated one in four students suffers from a mental health condition during their academic careers, so finding encouragement in a public place may help them overcome their fears about seeking professional help.

As many as 70% of U.S. college students are now using smartphones and mobile technology, a number that's expected to grow to 90% by 2016. This presents a great opportunity for counselor education and supervision programs. Counselors and counselors-in-training can share links and content on social media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram to help spread ideas and awareness, and assure students that they don't have to face their problems alone. Counselors can also promote smartphone apps designed to boost the health and wellness of users, from deep breathing exercises for stress relief to an intervention tool that helps people overcome suicidal thoughts and get help.

It's important to remember that beyond Counseling Awareness Month, the guidance and services offered through counselor education and supervision programs are always there when students are in need.

Although the economic and social context of work appears to be changing for more and more people, the author argues that time-honored and empirically supported theories of career development continue to be relevant and useful. However, these theories and the core assumptions that underlie them (e.g., the “matching metaphor”) may need to be augmented by models and methods that help students and workers to prepare to a greater degree for difficult developmental transitions, obstacles to preferred career paths, and negative career-life events such as unplanned job loss. The author offers a view of “career-life preparedness” that, while informed by social-cognitive career theory, is largely compatible with other approaches to career development and is linked conceptually to other recent work on career adaptability, resilience, and coping.

These are both challenging and exciting times for the field of career development and counseling. Much has been written about transformations in the nature and context of work (e.g., Blustein, 2006; Hesketh, 2000; Savickas, 2011). Wrought by sweeping change in such areas as technology, the global economic environment, and demographic and immigration patterns, the work world has become faster paced, more diverse, and less and less predictable for more and more workers. Many work organizations have been trimming their ranks of full-time workers, outsourcing some of their functions, and opting for part-time, contract, and project workers who can be moved around more flexibly and who do not require the same level of investment in employee benefits or career development.

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