A simple e-mail makes all the hard work worthwhile for Susan Branco Alvarado. “I may not show it all the time,” an adopted teenage client wrote to Alvarado, “but I really appreciate everything you have done for me. Thanks to you, my relationship with my mom has gotten a thousand
Category: Features
A summons calling a counselor to court brings with it enumerable questions and anxieties. What should you say to the judge? How should you present your credentials? Is it ethical to answer the opposing attorney’s questions? These concerns are enough to make some counselors avoid the court system altogether. But
Have you ever been driving along in your car, listening to the radio, and heard a song that completely took you back in time? All of a sudden, you remember what you were doing, how you were feeling and who you were with. That seems to be a common experience
Picture a fifth-grade classroom. One little boy will not sit still. He constantly interrupts the teacher and gets out of his chair during the lesson. Meanwhile, a little girl sits in the back row and gazes out the window. Ensnared in a daydream, she also has missed the lesson. Eventually,
How long does it take for you to return a phone call? Do you have a waiting list? Would you ever slide your fee? Do you keep up with clinical literature? Do you have leather furniture in your office? These are just a few questions that, when answered honestly, could
A school counselor’s introduction to advising a student at risk for suicide can be a trial by fire. After all, a young person’s life is possibly hanging in the balance of carefully chosen questions, inflections and body language. A computer-simulation game developed at Purdue University offers virtual training for such
At the tender age of 9, Marcheta Evans was already a budding counselor. Evans, whose family was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, would occasionally accompany her mother, a psychiatric nurse, to her job at a local hospital. During those visits, she played cards and made friends with some
If you were really lucky … you had a grandmother like mine. She was your best friend,” Helen Hudson writes in Kissing Tomatoes, a book about the years she spent caring for her grandmother. “The wall above my desk is filled with photographs of my Granny Jo, taken during the
It was 25 years ago when Bette Stewart’s husband was diagnosed with a mental illness. “I felt angry and alone, like my life was coming apart at the seams,” she recalls. “I asked the psychiatrist for help. I know now that if (my husband) was an alcoholic, I would have
Fans of TV sitcoms may fondly recall Cheers as the friendly neighborhood bar in Boston “where everybody knows your name.” The regular denizens of Cheers descended the stairs to be enveloped by an unwavering sense of camaraderie. Of equal appeal to these characters, however, was the fact that the bar