Rachel Jacoby, a licensed professional clinical counselor supervisor, once worked at a community mental health agency providing counseling services to youth in foster care. When she began treatment with an older teen, an unusual thing happened: The client referred to her as the number “14,” not by her name. Jacoby
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The mental health needs of older caregivers
Caregiving can take many forms. A woman in her 50s takes care of her husband who has a life-limiting disease. An adult child cares for an aging parent. Grandparents raise their grandchildren because their adult child is struggling with substance misuse. A recent State of Aging and Health in America
Embracing fandom in counseling
Fan communities, or fandoms, are often misunderstood by the public. Fandoms refers to people who share a common interest in an aspect of popular culture. Whether they are huge fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or enjoy dressing as anthropomorphic animal characters, also known as “furries,” people who dedicate their
Getting triggered as a counselor
The term countertransference has been discussed and debated since Sigmund Freud first argued that it was something taboo — a personal obstacle that would harm the therapeutic relationship. Today, counselors acknowledge that countertransference is inevitable. They are human and prone to having their own issues emerge, often without them even
Voice of Experience: Freud may have been right
As a young graduate student in a very person-centered program, most of my professors had little to say about Sigmund Freud that was positive, if they even said anything at all. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory is complicated and time-consuming, and much of it was based, at least originally, on Freud’s observations,
Overcoming counselors’ hesitancy to engage with autism
According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, approximately 1 in every 54 children are identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As the number of diagnoses continues to increase, there will in turn be an increased need for services, including mental
Perspectives on grief and loss
If you go to the books page on Amazon and enter the word “grief” in the search box, you’ll receive a message saying there are “over 60,000 results” available. To winnow the choices, you might decide to view only those titles released over the past 90 days. This narrows it
Yes, and … improv can be therapeutic
Two of the main rules of improv are that you must agree with the other person and add to the conversation. One of the most commonly used improv games “Yes, and …” illustrates these principles. Two people face each other. One person starts by voicing a single statement. The other
Responding to the increase of hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans
Violent attacks on Asians and Asian Americans (A/AA) have increased exponentially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, although the number of overall hate crimes in the United States’ largest cities decreased by 6% in 2020 compared
Feeling the strain: The effects of COVID-19 on children and adolescents
One of the most contentious — indeed, at times, vitriolic — public health debates of the COVID-19 era has revolved around the safety of opening schools for in-person classes. For some politicians, the push to open seemed to be influenced by optics — a signal that states were “open for