Title: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Career Paths for Counselors

Presenters: Danielle Irving-Johnson, EdS; Kristen Gidel Kelly, MEd; Elizabeth A. Prosek, PhD; and Elizabeth E. Burgin, PhD

Description: This CE provides professional counselors with a video on the overview of education, credentials, and skills needed to gain employment in crisis intervention and to best serve the clients in need of crisis intervention services. Danielle Irving from the Center for Counseling Practice, Policy, and Research at the American Counseling Association, interviews Kristen Gidel Kelly, LPCC-S, LICDC, CTTS, Senior Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, Suicide Prevention Team from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The article, ´Counseling Military Populations: A Content Analysis of Counseling Journals from 1998 to 2018’, by Prosek and Burgin (2020) is included to provide counselors with a rationale to know military population research trends within the counseling literature and understand suggestions for incorporating the philosophical principles of counseling into future research.

Title: Best Practice Guidelines for Publishing Rigorous Research in Counseling

Authors: Amanda L. Giordano, PhD; Michael K. Schmit, PhD; and Erika L. Schmit, PhD

Description: Best Practice Guidelines for Publishing Rigorous Research in Counseling (Giordano, Schmit, & Schmit, 2021) provides guidance for writing rigorous manuscripts for publications in counseling journals. This Continuing Professional Development resource provides counselors with a rationale to understand the process of constructing a manuscript, identify essential components to include in various section of the empirical paper, and discuss aspects to consider while pursuing publication.

Title: Counselor Tips for Success: Transitioning to New Positions in Schools

Presenters: Nancy Carlson, PhD and John P. Duggan, EdD

Description: Starting a new position in a new school is challenging, even for seasoned school counselors. Dr. Nancy Carlson discusses some tips and ideas for getting off to a good start with a new population of students. Topics covered range from organizing student schedules to handing a diverse student population with a variety of counseling needs.

Title: Climate Change and Mental Health

Presenters: Debra Sturm, PhD and John P. Duggan, EdD

Description: Part 1: The climate crisis is not only a threat to physical health, but also to mental health. In this video, Dr. Debbie Stern discusses how the role of professional counselors is impacted by the need to address environment-related anxiety and trauma concerns within the therapeutic relationship.

Part 2: The climate crisis impacts professional counselors on both a professional and personal level. In this video, Dr. Debbie Stern describes the importance of advocacy and social justice for achieving environmental justice, and how professional counselors must determine their degree of engagement with this issue.

Part 3: Counseling ethics infuse every aspect of clinical practice, including how counselors respond to issues stemming from environmental concerns. In this video, Dr. Debbie Stern discusses some of the ways the ACA Code of Ethics can be applied to working with clients whose mental health has been impacted by climate change.

Title: Expanding Perspectives: Systemic Approaches to College Students Experiencing Depression

Authors: Sean Newhart, EdS; Patrick R. Mullen, PhD; and Daniel Gutierrez, PhD

Description: Family and peer systems significantly influence college students’ mental health. Historically, professional counselors use a variety of treatment models to help clients with mental health concerns. Some interventions focus on the client as an individual, while other interventions include a “systems approach.” The authors of this article discuss research on systems-based treatment models when assisting U.S. college students with mental health concerns, such as depression.

Title: Self-Stigma, Mental Health Literacy, and Health Outcomes in Integrated Care

Authors: Allison Crowe, PhD; Patrick R. Mullen, PhD; and Kerry Littlewood, PhD

Description: The authors describe research on the self-stigma of mental illness and help seeking, mental health literacy, and health outcomes in an integrated care medical center. Results revealed that self-stigma of mental illness and self-stigma of seeking help had an inverse relationship with mental health literacy. No statistically significant relationships were found between health outcomes, either type of self-stigma, and mental health literacy. The authors discuss these and other findings and offer research and counseling implications.

Title: The Helping Relationship: From Core Dimensions to Brief and Integrative Possibilities, sixth edition

Authors: David Capuzzi, PhD; Mark D. Stauffer, PhD; and Douglas R. Gross, PhD

Description: This chapter has three purposes. First, it aids the reader in understanding the various factors that affect the helping relationship: definitions and descriptions, stages, core dimensions, strategies, and issues of diversity. Second, because we have asked each of our theory authors to discuss brief approaches as applied to the theory under consideration, we provide our readers with an overview of selected brief approaches, because these approaches, plus the impact of managed care, have precipitated an emphasis on using traditional theories in shorter term counseling. Third, because we know that, after reading this book, readers will have questions about whether to be a purist, in the literal sense of the term, and base all of their work with clients on a single theoretical set or somehow integrate the possibilities for working with clients into a more flexible way of helping, we also provide an overview of integrative counseling. We hope that the information presented in this chapter will not only help readers to understand the dynamics of the helping relationship and their application in both theory-specific and brief approaches but also aid them in incorporating these dynamics into an integrative theoretical approach.

Title: What Do We Know, or Think We Know, About How Counseling Works? And What Counselors Believe Matters Most - And Why Their Clients Disagree

Authors: Jeffrey A. Kottler, PhD and Richard S. Balkin, PhD

Description: Let’s acknowledge at the outset that there are decades of empirical research, not to mention practitioner anecdotes, to support the power, influence, and efficacy of counseling. This is True across a number of theoretical orientations, clinician styles, contexts, clinical specialties, diagnostic issues, and client problems. However, in spite of the confidence we might feel in the power of our profession to improve the quality of people’s lives, as well as to address their most challenging difficulties, we are by no means all in agreement as to why it works.In this initial overview of what we know, or at least what we believe may be the case, we review some of the consensual assumptions and common precepts about what most consistently produces the most satisfying outcomes—for both clients and their counselors.