Counseling is a preventive profession, typically working with issues and challenges that our clients face daily. However, client concerns often exist at deeper levels, and counseling process often shades into therapy. As counselors, you regularly encounter children and youth who may be at risk. Whether with a medicated child who
Tag: Mental Health
Recreational marijuana recently became legal in Colorado, and several other states may soon follow suit. It remains to be seen what impact this decision ultimately will have on counselors working with clients in school, addictions, mental health and other settings. Catherine Iliff, a licensed professional counselor in Pueblo, Colo., says
There is a saying often repeated among people who skydive, bungee jump, white water raft or take part in other adventure sports: “We take risk not to escape life but to keep life from escaping.” This phrase that encapsulates the adventure sports subculture also shines a light on the disconnect
Twenty years ago, the preponderance of Elaine Beckwith’s most troubling cases tended to center on substance abuse and the outpouring of near-psychotic clients cast into the general population after the onset of deinstitutionalization. The past few years have brought a new pattern to the fore, one as pronounced as it
Cutting. Burning. Headbanging. Embedding. Self-hitting. Pinpricking. Thinking about people intentionally hurting themselves in these ways can be difficult but, sometimes, counselors don’t have a choice. When a client struggling with nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) appears in a counselor’s office, the counselor’s task is to help — and the perhaps natural reaction
Three years ago, I was asked to leave my position as a therapist and take a leadership role as a supervisor of school-based mental health services. At the time, I was seeing a small caseload of children at their school because of problem behaviors in their classroom environment. When I
Melancholy piano music plays in the background as people flash back to times in their lives when they felt happiness. Returning to the present, we see individuals in obvious emotional pain. A voice asks, “When you’re depressed, where do you want to go? Nowhere. Who do you feel like seeing?
When taking my undergraduate and graduate classes many moons ago, my least favorite courses were Biopsychology and Cognitive Processes, during which our professors would lecture at great length about the structure and function of the brain. As a student embarking on a new career in mental health, I was aware
Alex Teves loved trying new things: going to a hole-in-the wall neighborhood restaurant that his friends had overlooked; drinking a new beer from a local brewery; pushing himself to the limit in an 8-mile obstacle course known as the Tough Mudder; bringing together groups of people who wouldn’t ordinarily run in
At age 16, Kim Johancen-Walt became a suicide survivor after her brother, Kevin, took his own life through carbon monoxide poisoning in 1988. Johancen-Walt, who grew up in a suburb of Denver, recalls being both deeply saddened and incredibly angry with her brother for ending his life. “I remember [a