Counseling Specializations and Multidisciplinary Teams
Instructions:-
Assignment 1
Part 1
- Evaluate the role of your specialization within the field of counseling, beginning with your own description of the field itself, including both the history and the philosophies involved, explaining where your specialization fits, and describing how your specialization might collaborate with one other specialization that you describe. Cite the articles or other sources you use for the basis of your ideas.
In this part, specifically address the following questions:
- How would you describe the key philosophies of the counseling profession: wellness, resilience, and prevention? Choose a wellness model, and explain how that model impacts the way in which counselors view clients and the concerns brought to counseling, including the kinds of information counselors need to have about their clients.
- How have those key philosophies developed? Provide a brief historical perspective of the counseling profession focused on the key philosophies of wellness, resilience, and prevention. Include the beliefs and assumptions that support those philosophies.
- How did your specialization develop? Identify your preferred counseling specialization and describe how the specialization emerged or the profession developed, including the key ideas on which it is based.
- What other counseling specialization works well in collaboration with your specialization? Briefly explain the history of how this other specialization developed, highlighting the ways in which it complements yours.
Part 2
- Now, select one of the following two cases, either Ashley or Paul, as a foundation for illustrating how professionals in different specializations might work together to meet the needs of the client you choose:
Ashley
Ashley, a 12-year-old girl, admits to one of her teachers that she feels very depressed. Her mother has recently remarried, and Ashley is having difficulty adjusting to life with her stepfather and his two children. She is not able to concentrate in class or do her homework.
Paul
Paul, a 32-year-old man, seeks counseling at a community mental health center. He has recently returned from his third deployment to a combat zone. He reports drinking frequently and feeling anxious. Paul’s wife has tried to reassure him that everything is fine, but he is reluctant to leave the house and has missed more than a week of work.
For this part, apply what you have learned about counseling and how professionals can work together to explain how you might collaborate with a professional in another specialization to serve the client you chose.
In this part, complete the following:
- Analyze how professionals from your specialization and from the other specialization you examined in Part 1 might collaborate to benefit the person and family in the case study you chose.
- Describe the role and function of each of the professionals involved.
- Identify the characteristics that make each role unique and make them effective counselors for this case.
- Assess how to ensure good collaboration and communication between the professionals representing the two specializations.
- Identify the type of outside agency that could assist this client to promote optimal wellness, providing two examples.
- Explain the standards or criteria that you would use to evaluate the collaboration.
Review the scoring guide given in the resources to make sure you understand how this assignment will be graded.
Other Requirements
Your paper must meet the following requirements:
- Resources: Cite at least three resources from the professional literature that you use as the basis of your ideas for Part 1.
- APA formatting: Resources and citations must be formatted according to current APA style.
- Font and Font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.
- Length of Paper: Doing a thorough job on this assignment is likely to require approximately 3–4 typed, double-spaced pages.
- Turnitin: You are required to submit your final version of this paper to Turnitin to generate a final report prior to submitting the assignment for grading. From the Turnitin tool, first submit to the draft link to check your work for any necessary edits. Once the paper is finalized and all edits have been made, submit your final paper to the Final report option for the assignment. Please be advised it can take up to a day to obtain the percentage from Turnitin. When your paper is downloaded and viewable in Turnitin, save the originality report. Refer to the Turnitin Tutorial: Viewing an Originality Report (linked in the Resources) for guidance.
- Submit your assignment using the following file naming format: Your Name_Assignment Number_Assignment Title (example: Ima_Learner_u06a1_CounselingSpecialization).
- In the comment section, provide the percentage from the final Turnitin report (example: Final Turnitin percentage = 4%). Please be prepared to provide your faculty member with a copy of the Turnitin report should this be requested of you.
Solution
Counseling Specializations and Multidisciplinary Teams
PART 1: Key Philosophies of Counseling
The profession of counseling empowers individuals, families as well as groups to attain mental health, career goals, education, and wellness. The key philosophies of the profession are wellness, resilience, and prevention. Wellness is the optimization of human potential via positive choices to an individual’s lifestyle (Van Deurzen, 2012). It is the process and state of the quest for optimum human functioning; which entails the spirit, mind, and body. Wellness also entails the togetherness of the spirit, mind, and body. Resilience, on the other hand, denotes the capacity of individuals to recover from difficulties quickly and regain the original state (McLeod, 2013). Prevention philosophy seeks to stop or reduce the frequency of occurrence of an event.
Wellness philosophy dates back to the periods of Aristotle. The resilience models were established in the 80s with most of the models being specific to the particular group (Van Deurzen, 2012). The counseling profession seeks to advocate for wellness through preventing, developmental as well as wellness-focused interventions (McLeod, 2013). It is crucial that the professional understand the difference between wellness and health. Health encompasses physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, and social factors. However, wellness is the correlation between these factors of health, and when the factors are balanced then a high level of wellness is achieved (McLeod, 2013). As such the counseling professionals must seek to identify how these factors relate and address all of them when handling a client. This is different from the health care profession where the individual factors get addressed separately.
School Counsellor
My choice of specialization is the school counseling. This profession first developed in 100’s as a response by the American public schools to the industrial revolution. These counselors were often the teachers who inherited the position along with a list of other duties to execute with no relief from the teaching duties. Furthermore, there was no financial compensation given to these teachers. They were perceived as a mechanism by which the institutions could help in preparing individuals for the real world setting (McLeod, 2013). These professionals were referred to as vocational counselors, and they would prepare the students to go to work.
The America Personnel and Guidance Association (currently America Counselling Association) was established in the 50’s. During this period, it took the establishment of the Russian satellite to push the American education landscape to shift (McLeod, 2013). There was a critical need to develop social and educational reforms to regains America’s superiority stand regarding education and technology. It is during this period that the service approach was incorporated into guidance. The school counselors were pushed to base their activities on clearly outline goals and objectives.
The profession gained its current status in the 90s. Today, the emphasis is put on the developmental, planned programming that substitutes the even more recent views of school counselors. Currently, they are viewed as a separate entity to teaching. They are regarded as clinical service providers (McLeod, 2013).
The other counseling specialization that best works with the school counseling is the Guidance and career counseling. Career counseling fund its way I the US educational system in the 19 century. This was as a result of the societal change, upheaval, and transition (McMahon, 2016). Historians describe the profession as a progressive social reform intervention aimed are eradication poverty and improving the poor living conditions of the communities that have resulted from the rapid industrialization and consequent movement of people to urban centers (McMahon, 2016). This profession aims at guiding individuals to decide on their career choices so as to be absorbed in the working sector. In this process, the counselor is expected to understand the current dynamics and trends in the job sector to help individuals make informed decisions. Currently, the profession extends to offering placement services for individuals after completion of their programs.
PART 2: Case Analysis
The case selected is Ashley’s case, and the
professionals who may play a role are the teachers, school counselor and the
guidance and career counselors. The teachers have the role of noticing the
behavioral change of the Ashley as well as implementing the proposed
innervations. The school counselor would not only assess the challenge Ashley
is experienced but would also engage the parents in trying to find the
solution. The guidance and career counseling professional may come in and help
identify the interests of Ashley. The professional would then propose
mechanisms of ensuring that Ashley focusses on her interest areas and not
family matters. By engaging each other
in a meeting, the two counseling professionals would be able to share their
ideas. Even though the two professionals may not have a single session with the
client, but instead individual sessions, they can share the notes from the
sessions with each other. In deciding the intervention, they can each propose
their thoughts and select the best one. The best that they would assess their
collaboration is the reports of improvement by the clients. When the client’s
status improves, then it is a show of the effectiveness of the
interventions.
References
McMahon, M. (Ed.). (2016). Career counselling: Constructivist approaches. Routledge.
McLeod, J. (2013). An introduction to counselling. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
Van Deurzen, E. (2012). Existential counselling & psychotherapy in practice. Sage.
