Mental health counseling is a field that focuses on helping people to achieve mental and emotional wellness. The treatment plan will typically consist of seeing clients continuously throughout the year. Specific areas of specialization exist in mental health counseling, such as counseling for addiction, trauma, or youth services. If a mental health counselor specializes in youth services, he could work in a variety of different settings, such as a school or a behavioral health center. This paper will define the mental health counseling profession and describe typical duties of the job, the population it serves, and the type of education needed.
Mental health counseling began to be accepted as a professional career in the 1970s. Mental health counselors had been in existence prior but their role had only been loosely defined. When the American Mental Health Counselor Association was established in the mid-1970s, it cleared the path for a more defined career. Soon the Association joined with the American Counseling Association and the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) was created. In order to be taken as a legitimate profession, the mental health counseling field was provided with a set of training standards provided by the American Mental Health Counselor Association, which required that professionals in the mental health counseling field obtain “60 semester credit hours and a minimum of 1,000 clock hours of clinical supervision” (New York Behavioral Health, 2018). Mental health counseling is now recognized “as a primary mental health profession in the health care human resource statistics of the Center for Mental Health Services and the National Institute of Mental Health” (New York Behavioral Health, 2018). As Barden, Conley and Young (2015) point out, mental health counseling is now being integrated with other approaches to care for a more holistic service to clients.

There are a number of jobs one can pursue with a mental health counseling degree:

· Licensed Professional Counselor

· Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor

· Human Services Educator

· Higher Education Counselor

· Student Affairs Administrator

· Drug and Alcohol Counselor

· Addictions Counselor

· Licensed Mental Health Counselor

These jobs are spread out through...…all of which I possess. The counselor also has to be a dedicated student with a lifelong interest in learning more about the latest research in mental health counseling, which I definitely am because it is such a fascinating field.

Professional development that I will need to be qualified to hold the job will be a Master’s degree plus 2000 supervised hours. This will allow me to apply for certification to be a professional mental health counselor. Once I have this certification, I can apply to various clinics, schools, or open my own private office. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these environments. To practice independently, one needs a strong client base and that may be difficult to obtain on one’s own. Working as part of a group will enable one to have steady clientele, but it will also mean giving up a percentage of one’s pay to the group. So there are drawbacks and benefits of any environment. The key is finding one that suits me well and that I am happy to…