Counselor As Consultant

David A. Scott, Chadwick W. Royal, Daniel B. (Brian) Kissinger

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483322612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

Providing counseling professionals with a solid grounding in the primary theories, skills, and models used by professional consultants, Counselor as Consultant is the first text that explicitly addresses the new CACREP core standards for consultation. The book's strong focus on intentionality, reflection, and wellness helps readers develop a strong sense of counselor identity, while its structure and exercises reinforce learning. Abundant exercises and case illustrations help counselors-in-training translate theory into practice and learn the essential skills needed for consultation positions.

1

Introduction and Overview of Consultation

Introduction

Throughout my years as a counselor educator, I have lost track of how many times I have been asked by students in class, “Consultation in mental health, what does that mean?” Imagine taking the skills and techniques learned in your graduate program and applying those to helping individuals and organizations in your community, state, or even on the other side of the world! Mental health consultation brings together the knowledge and skills of traditional counseling with the ability to reach consultees in settings such as schools and small or large organizations that need students in specialized assistance. Did you know that businesses and schools of all sizes regularly use the services of consultants to help with a myriad of issues? Did you also know that consultation is a billion dollar industry (Aron, 2012)? Well, get ready for a journey through this exciting topic! We will explore the unique ways mental health consultation can serve our communities. Mental health consultation has become a vital component of training for all types of mental health professionals. Most graduate school accrediting agencies have incorporated consultation into the standards of training for counseling and other mental health graduate programs. So, whether you want to work with the small bakery downtown or your countries’ largest school system (or both), mental health consultation could be a viable career option.

The goal of this book is to provide information to mental health professionals on how they can serve as consultants in some of the most popular settings in the world of work. Through numerous guided practice exercises and discussion points, this book will help you explore the challenges and rewards of being a mental health professional consultant. We support the idea that learning about consultation can best be achieved by blending theory with practice, with the main focus on exploration via case illustrations, exercises, and discussion points. While we have focused the book on the current related standards for consultation as developed by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling & Related Educational Programs (CACREP), readers will quickly realize that this book can be used by other mental health professionals (social workers, psychologists, marriage and family) acting as consultants.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter you will

• Memorize and be able to recall the historical background of mental health consultation

• Define and be able to demonstrate the types of consultation used by consultants

• Define and be able to explain the term consultation

• Be familiar with the current CACREP standards for consultation

Before continuing on in this text, please take a few minutes to complete the self-assessment located in Guided Practice Exercise 1.1. No need to worry about answering “don’t know” during the pretest, the answers to the questions can be found throughout this text. Also, don’t forget to complete this self-assessment again at the end of the semester to evaluate how much your knowledge of mental health consultation has changed!

Exercise 1.1: Self-Assessment Pretest and Posttest

Part of the process in learning about consultation is evaluation of your knowledge pertaining to consultation. Below is a pretest and posttest that will help evaluate the development in knowledge about consultation. The test is designed to take place during the first meeting and then at the end of the training.

1. Is there one definition of consultation that can be used in every setting? Explain your answer.

2. Explain why consultation is now a part of established standards for most mental health professionals.

3. Explain the difference between consultation and supervision.

4. Explain the difference between consultation and traditional mental health counseling.

5. Explain the role of the consultant.

6. Explain the role of the consultee.

7. Describe the skills needed to be an effective consultant.

8. Describe some of the settings in which a consultant could provide services.

9. Do you need to keep records and be skilled in report writing to be a consultant? Please explain your answer.

10. Describe the role of ethics in consultation.

11. Is there a code of ethics for consultants?

12. Describe a few of the models of consultation.

13. What are the stages in the consultation process?

14. Explain the need for consultants to have knowledge and training in issues related to diversity and multiculturalism.

15. Can consultants play an important role in school settings? How?

16. Can consultants play an important role in mental health settings? How?

17. Can consultants play an important role in career counseling settings? How?

18. Can consultant play an important role in organizational settings? How?

19. Describe what the term consultation in mental health means to you.

Historical Perspectives

Consultation is a common practice and has been used since early in the 13th century (Gallessich, 1982) when physicians would request a consult by another physician with typically more training or experience in a certain area. The consulting physician would examine the treating physician’s patient and work collaboratively to reach a diagnosis and treatment plan for the patient. The term consultant is used in many fields, such as finance consultant, travel consultant, wedding consultant, to name a few (Gibson & Mitchell, 2008).

Mental health consultation caught the attention of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) back in the 1950s (MacLennan, 1986) and was considered to be a piece of the overall system of care in the mental health field. The area of mental health consulting picked up speed when the government passed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act Amendments of 1965 (Pub. L. 89–105), which provided funding to hire service providers to serve as consultants in mental health agencies. Although funding was now being provided, many professionals lacked the proper training to serve as mental health consultants (MacLennan, 1986).

In 1970, Gerald Caplan published the beginning standards of mental health consultation with his book, The Theory and Practice of Mental Health Consultation. In his book, Caplan created the mental health consultation model which established many of the guidelines that are used today to describe the practice of mental health consultation. Caplan began his exploration and development of mental health consultation when he worked with emotionally disturbed immigrant children in Israel. The program in Israel worked with thousands of children located in hundreds of individual residential centers throughout the country. Caplan’s team was assigned to work with the residential center’s instructors on how to deal with the difficult children at each of the centers. Caplan (1970) discovered that by shifting the focus from a specific child to the actual relationships between the children and instructor, he could change the entire approach the instructors were using with all of the children in the program and not just one child. So instead of traveling between programs, exhausting resources, he could work with the instructor to reach all of the children in a specific residential center. Thus, modern day mental health consultation was created.

Exercise 1.2: Consultation for Many

As described earlier, Gerald Caplan began using consultation to work with residential program staff and indirectly, the adolescent clients. Take a few moments and think about a situation where this type of consultation could be used in an organization. Create a scenario where the consultant goes into an organization and works with the consultee (manager/administrator) and indirectly affects how the consultee will work with the employees within the organization.

Caplan went on to work with Erich Lindemann at Harvard University who was working on the foundations of mental health consulting. At the time, Lindemann (1944) was also working on the creation of a crisis theory to help the survivors of the 1942 Coconut Grove Fire. Lindemann and his team helped Caplan move his philosophy and thinking away from traditional mental health counseling to more of a focus on mental health consultation and the delineation of the two schools of thought. While mental health consultation retains many aspects of traditional mental health counseling, consultation has its specific roles, definitions, and procedures that differentiate it from mental health counseling. Researchers Douglas Fuchs, Lynn Fuchs, Jeannette Dulan, Holley Roberts and Pamela Fernstrom (1992), even stated that one of the most used and highly regarded services in schools and mental health agencies are consultation services.

Working Definition and Types of Consultation

There have been many attempts to define consultation and a definition of consultation continues to be a question generated by countless students in our programs. Chapter 2 will provide a more in-depth description of the roles and definitions of the counselor as consultant. Caplan (1970) suggested that the term of consultation is viewed very differently by different professionals and could be used to describe any activity performed by a specialist. DeWayne J. Kurpius and Dale R. Fuqua (1993) concluded that the definitions of consultation by professionals are very similar in nature...