The Counselor Is a Psychologist

School counselors are anxious about their status and identity as professional workers. They are criticized by other helping professions for their superficiality, and they are being dispossessed of their basic helping functions by school psychologists and social workers. Solutions proposed are abandonment of the guidance model for counselors, and adoption of the counseling psychologist model geared to a two-year master's degree level. Counselors are being called upon increasingly to function as psychological specialists in behavior change and their training has become firmly based in the psychological aspects of behavioral science. Statements by the American School Counselors Association and a growing number of counselor educators emphasize the psychological base of counseling practice.     

Transference,Insight, and the Counselor's Intentions During a Counseling Hour

The interactive effects of transference and client insight on session quality, and the relationship between transference and counselor intentions, were studied within the context of a single counseling session. Thirty-eight experienced counselors audiotaped one counseling session and rated their intentions for each intervention. Counselors also rated transference, insight, and session quality. As hypothesized, when transference was high, client insight was positively related to session quality. Furthermore, negative transference was related to several counselor intentions. Negative transference may signal counselors to focus on the relationship and underlying client issues, and to avoid structuring and directing behavior change.     

Engaging Clients,Families, and Communities as Partners in Mental Health

Counselors are being called on to reach beyond the office and clinic to partner with clients, their families, and communities to address mental health and social problems. Counselors need models of collaboration that guide them in building transformative client‐family‐community partnerships. W. J. Doherty and T. J. Mendenhall (2006) presented a model of community‐based collaboration in their article Citizen Health Care: A Model for Engaging Patients, Families, and Communities as Co‐Producers of Health. After reviewing their article, an analysis of a university‐community partnership is used to frame the discussion of the model's implications for counselors and counselor education programs.     

Employing Ethical Codes and Decision-Making Models: A Developmental Process

Counselors often encounter seemingly intractable ethical dilemmas. To assist counselors who face difficult situations, the helping professions have generated both ethical codes and decision-making models. Because the process of decision making seems to be related to cognitive-moral development, this article details ethical codes and decision models and speculates on how counselor level of development may influence use of such codes and models.     

Performance of Mental Health Counselors in Integrated Primary and Behavioral Health Care

Integrated primary and behavioral health care (IPBH) is becoming a preferred mode of service delivery in the United States. Integrated care includes the participation of medical and mental health professionals, such as mental health counselors. The clinical outcomes of these professionals need to be studied to determine their effectiveness in such settings. We examined the performance of 10 mental health counselors on the clinical outcome of 1,747 clients treated in an IPBH center. Analyses using growth curve modeling and pre‐post test design revealed that mental health counselors were effective overall, but they differed in client dropout rates and efficiency in reducing clients' initial symptoms. We used the analyses to rank order counselors based on their effectiveness. Counselors who were the most effective varied in their efficiency but demonstrated the lowest client dropout rates. Implications for future research and counseling practice were discussed.     

The National Academy of Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselors: Creating A New Professional Identity

The National Academy of Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselors was developed by the American Mental Health Counselors Association as an effort to firmly establish the role and identity of mental health counselors in the fields of counseling and mental health. This article provides a brief background of and discusses future goals for the Academy.     

What Client Behaviors Make Counselors Angry? An Exploratory Study

Counselors may feel anger when clients do not behave according to their expectations of what is a good client. Client resistance, client impositions, verbal attacks on the counselor, and overinvolvement by the counselor in client dynamics seem to be relatively common occurrences that annoy counselors. Possible counselor responses to these feelings are discussed.     

Attributional Bias in Counselors' Diagnoses: The Effect of Resources1

Three experiments were conducted to test a model of attributional bias in counseling diagnosis. The model predicted that (a) available helping resources influence diagnostic attributions and (b) this effect is mediated by the effect resources have on the diagnostician's perception of his or her helping role. In each experiment, undergraduates served as diagnosticians in a simulated referral agency. Referral resouces for half of the subjects were oriented toward dealing with personal problems; resources for the other half were oriented toward dealing with situational problems. In referring each client, subjects indicated whether they perceived the problem to lie with the client (a dispositional atrribution) or with his social environment (a situational attribution). As predicted, subjects with person-oriented resources were more likely to perceive clients' problems to be dispositional than were subjects with situation-oriented resources. Results of Experiment 3 indicated that this effect was mediated by the influences resources had on subjects' perception of their helping role.     

Models of Disability: Implications for the Counseling Profession

Because of the increasing number of people with disabilities, counselors of all specialties and theoretical orientations will be called on to provide services to clients with disabilities. The authors present a brief overview of 4 major models of disability to provide an introduction to the varying definitions and causal and responsibility attributions of disability. Viewing the client with a disability as an individual with multiple identities, roles, functions, and environments facilitates the counseling process.     

The helping alliance and premature termination

The study was conducted to determine the relationship between strength of the helping alliance and type of client termination (premature or with mutual knowledge of client and counselor). Participants were 102 client-counselors dyads at a university counseling center. After an average of 8 sessions, clients and couneselors completed Alexander & Luborsky's (1986) Helping Alliance Questionnaires. Clients terminated after an average of 19 sessions. Clients who later terminated with mutual knowledge of their counselors gave significantly higher strength of helping alliance ratings than did clients who later terminated unilaterally and prematurely. Counselors' ratings of strength of helping alliance were only modestly related to clients' ratings and unrelated to type of client termination.     

Elementary School Counselors in California

The number, school location, academic preparation and experience, and functions and duties of “elementary school counselors” in California were studied. Questionnaires were answered by 175 counselors, 118 elementary school principals, and 312 teachers in schools employing counselors. The number of children in the participating schools was 133,125, or five per cent of all pupils in grades K-8 in the State. Counselors reported that they spent 50 per cent of their time working with pupils, 17 per cent with teachers, 10 per cent with administrators, 12 per cent with parents, and 11 per cent with probation, welfare, and other officials. The counselors and the principals generally agreed on the rank order of importance of the functions of elementary school counselors and on the most important skills and personality characteristics counselors should have. The teachers reported that counselors gave them most help by testing individual pupils, counseling with pupils, helping them with classroom problems, and participating in parent conferences. Elements of an ideal counseling program at the district and school level as well as deficiencies in present programs were described by the respondents.     

Posttermination Friendship Between Counselors and Clients

This study examined counselors' behaviors and attitudes regarding friendships and sexual relationships with former clients. A random sample of 96 members of the American Mental Health Counselors Association responded to our survey. Although a minority of counselors (33%) believed that posttermination sexual relationships might be acceptable 5 years after termination, only 4% admitted to engaging in such relationships. In contrast, 70% of the counselors believed that posttermination friendships were acceptable 2 years (on average) after termination and 33% acknowledged that they had engaged in such friendships. Potential harm to the client was the most important concern expressed by the counselors. Ethical and research implications are discussed.     

The Sexual Identity Timeline: A Reflection Tool for Developing Competence in Counseling

Greater attention to sexual identity development from an inclusive and affirmative perspective must be incorporated into counselor education training. Counselors are well positioned to address issues related to human sexuality; however, without reflection across the spectrum of sexuality-related issues, counselors may rely on personal bias, or they may choose to avoid the topic altogether. In order to adequately train counselors, it is important to identify learning activities that counselor educators can utilize. Given the significance of sexuality across the lifespan, we propose that counselor educators actively guide their students through reflection about their own sexual identity development. This article presents the Sexual Identity Timeline (SIT) as a reflective learning activity to incorporate into the counseling curriculum.     

Counseling for the transition to adulthood as joint, goal-directed action

Transition is important in the career literature as it identifies times at which people are often likely to consult counselors about issues for which they need help. However, the counseling literature has not provided a conceptualization of, or research on, the joint, goal-directed actions and projects of the counselor and the client, which explicitly reflect the goal-directed nature of the transition itself. To address this issue, 12 counseling dyads, representing 37 counseling sessions, were studied. In these dyads, counseling was observed as the joint, goal-directed action between professional counselors and youth who sought assistance with their transition to adulthood. The data were collected using the action-project method. The counseling sessions were video-recorded, then immediately played back for the counselor and client separately to gather their recalled thoughts and feeling during counseling. Detailed qualitative analysis of the data set addressed the research question, “What are the goal-directed projects that counselors and their clients jointly construct, articulate, and enact relevant to the transition to adulthood?” The findings indicated the relationship and identity are intertwined goal-directed projects within counseling as well as outside of it. These projects contributed to the reframing and reorganization of clients' transition projects outside of counseling in occupational, educational, and familial domains. The findings suggest important implications for counseling youth in transition, that is, counselors and clients explicitly address their joint relationship and identity goals in an effort to realize a mutually satisfactory and important transition to adulthood.     

Systematic Counseling: The T-F-A Model for Counselor Intervention

Counselors in educational settings are usually not free to select the kinds of clients and problems with which they may work most effectively. Therefore, counselors must select counseling strategies that maximize the probability of helping all clients achieve personal goals. These strategies may focus primarily on changing how clients think, feel, or act (T-F-A). Combinations of thinking, feeling, and acting strategies are illustrated along with relationships to different counseling theories. Effective counselors need to systematically use varying combinations of T-F-A strategies that will be of maximum value in helping individual clients to change their behavior.     

Defining Moments: Catalysts for Professional Development

In this series of papers, 17 genetic counselors describe defining moments, that is, personal experiences or events that led to a further realization of themselves as genetic counselors. These experiences, both positive and negative, describe a significant impact on the authors' professional growth and development. A call for papers was issued through the National Society of Genetic Counselors listserv and through the Journal of Genetic Counseling in 2001. This call resulted in the following 15 papers in which the authors were asked to describe the nature of a defining moment and how it affected their professional identity and practice. The authors provided an account of the experience or event, what it was about the experience that made it a defining moment, how it affected them personally and professionally, and if a defining moment was negative, how they were able to derive positive outcomes. Implications of these defining moments for other genetic counselors are discussed in a concluding paper.     

Intergroup helping during the coronavirus crisis: Effects of group identification,ingroup blame and third party outgroup blame

Two studies tested predictors of helping across national boundaries. British participants reported blame attributions for the coronavirus crisis, either to the British government (ingroup blame), or to the Chinese government (third party outgroup blame), and it was tested whether this was associated with intentions to donate money to help outgroup members suffering from effects of the coronavirus crisis in the world's poorer countries. It was hypothesized that strength of identification with the national ingroup would be negatively associated with blame attributions to the ingroup, and that it would be positively associated with blame attributions to a third party outgroup. Blame attributions were predicted in turn to be related to outgroup helping, with ingroup blame being positively associated with helping intentions, and third party outgroup blame being negatively associated with helping intentions. Support for these predictions were found in one exploratory (N = 100) and one confirmatory (N = 250) study.     

Sexual Contact During and After Professional Relationships: Practices and Attitudes of Female Counselors

A national sample of female counselors (N = 377) was surveyed regarding sexual contact in professional relationships. Few respondents reported engaging in sexual contact either during or following professional relationships with clients, supervisees, or students. Individuals with doctoral degrees were more likely to have engaged in sexual contact with their own counselors, supervisors, or teachers. Counselors viewed sexual contact in current professional relationships as less ethical than contact in subsequent relationships, although relationships with former clients were seen as less ethical than relationships with former supervisees or students. Compared with male counselors from a previous study, female counselors were less likely to report sexual contact in their professional roles. Implications for research and training are discussed.     

Coping With Academic Problems: An Empirical Examination of Brickman et al.'s Models of Helping and Coping1

According to Brickman et al. (1982), people facing problems make attributions about responsibility for causing and for solving the problem. Four models of helping and coping emerge. The present investigation examined 2 key questions. First, do individuals assign responsibility exclusively to the person or external forces, or do they exhibit a pattern of distributing responsibility among several causes? And second, do the models provide superior explanatory power relative to the individual attributions? College students provided information about their assumptions about causes and solutions to their own academic problems. Students revealed all 3 patterns. Furthermore, those making self‐attributions of responsibility for solutions had higher grade point averages (GPAs) than did those making other attributions. Implications for the Brickman et al. analysis and framework are discussed.