Superheroes have a profound influence on American culture. Recently, Marvel Comics’ Black Panther came to life on the movie screen. It appears the movie had a twofold impact. First, it brought heroic life to a seemingly little-known character. Second, unlike most other big-screen superhero movies, Black Panther placed value on

Superstorm Sandy. Newtown. The Pulse nightclub. Counselors were there to help people through all of those disasters, plus countless others, both natural and human-caused, through the past decade. Disaster mental health counseling has grown and become more standardized in the process. With each disaster, practitioners learn the subtleties of what

One of the most uplifting and powerful things counselors can do for their clients is to become a “nonanxious presence.” The term, originally coined by Jewish Rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman, is used to describe an individual who provides a calm, cool, focused and collected environment that empowers others

Thanatechnology : Any kind of technology that can be used to deal with death, dying, grief, loss and illness.   Kelly (an alias), an eighth-grader, sits with her friends in the school auditorium as her principal calls out the names of each of her classmates who were killed in the

Recent research has revealed an alarming development: The number of youth admitted to the hospital for a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation nearly doubled between 2008 and 2015. The findings, published in the May 2018 issue of the journal Pediatrics, analyzed seven years of billing data for emergency room and

[EDITOR’s NOTE: This is an online-only companion article to “Guiding lights,” a feature on the ins and outs of the counselor supervision process appearing in the June issue of Counseling Today.]   Counselor supervision can have quite a steep learning curve — one that often comes with several ups and

Counselors are not immune to trauma — in fact, far from it. Many practitioners say that personal or familial experience with trauma or mental illness actually spurred them to become professional counselors. The connection between personal experience and the pull to become a counselor is something that is hard to