Membership in a profession offers an individual status and responsibility. Law and medicine, both considered models of professionalism, are founded on a body of knowledge, technique, and practice. This chapter describes the mental health professions and outlines types of degrees, degree requirements, licensure requirements, board certifications associated with a profession, and the scope of practice of the professions. The chapter helps the reader distinguish counseling from psychology and the other mental health professions. Psychiatrists are licensed physicians who hold either the MD or DO degree. Psychologists treat individuals with psychotherapy and counseling, and assess individuals with IQ, aptitude, personality, and interest tests. Psychiatric nurses are master’s-degree–trained nurses with specialized coursework in psychotherapeutic approaches. Marriage and family therapists focus on relationship concerns experienced by couples or families. Social workers generally specialize in public policy or clinical social work.

The focus of career counseling has been on helping individuals successfully enter the world of work. This chapter provides a description of the career counseling specialty, defining the roles and functions, employment settings, and clients of career counselors. It provides a brief history of the professional specialty, with information on historic and current credentialing. The chapter outlines professional credentialing and licensure matters for career counselors. It describes ethical and legal issues specific to the practice of career counseling and explains diversity issues and ethical decision making. It differentiates the roles and functions of practitioners of career counseling from those of practitioners of other counseling specialties. The chapter reviews the assessment issues of career counseling. Career counselors practice in a variety of settings and render services to diverse individuals, corporations, and organizations. They must have sufficient knowledge and training to assess clients and administer tests.

This chapter explains two essential elements form Sleep Therapy, which are based on sleep science and psychology principles. Many people find this background intriguing. What’s more, it is always easier to carry out techniques when one understands how they work. The elements of Sleep Therapy are: uncovering one’s natural sleep processes and associating one’s bed with sleep. By understanding how sleep comes and goes in the natural state one can see more clearly how to restore healthy sleep. Good sleep comes when our biological sleep processes can operate without interference. Associating one’s bed with sleep element of Sleep Therapy is based on something called “conditioning” or “learned associations”. These are connections one make in their mind (automatically) between two things that occur together on several occasions.

A diagnosis of schizophrenia is terrifying and demoralizing to both the client and family members and has, until recently, been associated with dread and despair, the anticipation of a lifetime of chronic struggle, and a bewildering journey through the quagmire of psychiatric institutions and treatments. This chapter focuses on schizophrenia while noting the additional psychotic disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) for the purpose of honing in on issues of intersectionality and resiliency. Gaining greater understanding about the nature of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders requires the development of more effective strategies for treatment at the onset and with long-term chronic conditions. Evidence-based practice points to a combination of psychopharmacological and psychosocial interventions. The recovery model approach, based on hopes and lived experience, emphasizes the centrality of the individual's desires and initiative in relation to treatment planning.

As cultural diversity increases in the United States, school social workers and psychologists are on the front lines of empowering children and families to deal effectively with a public school system that has the power to influence the lives of children and families in positive and negative ways. The development of bilingual, bicultural, and culturally competent social workers is critical for a positive interaction and healthy relationship among the child, the family, and the school systems, especially when a child demonstrates some form of learning difficulty. Culturally competent school clinicians play a central role in appreciating and dealing with the power, powerlessness, and unequal power relationships that are inherent in these systems. Empowering diverse families will result in vast numbers of children experiencing more satisfying and productive relationships with the educational system and will help them reconcile the various cultural challenges presented by the home, the community, and the school.

Treatment outcome studies in the discipline of social work, psychology, and psychiatry have demonstrated the efficacy and effectiveness of differential psychotherapy approaches in addressing the psychological needs of individuals across the life span. Throughout the last four decades, scholar-practitioners have engaged in a professional quest to find evidence to support the efficacy of psychotherapy in ameliorating an array of clinical symptoms and levels of distress in identified patient or client populations. This chapter presents an overview of evidence-based practice with ethnically diverse clients. Predicated on an integrative understanding of evidence-based practice and cultural competency in mental health and clinical care settings, and on the importance of intersectionality as the guiding theoretical perspective for effective delivery of patient-centered services, it presents selected conceptual frameworks for the cultural adaptation of evidence-based treatments. The chapter highlights culturally adapted cognitive-behavioral therapy as an exemplar of evidence-based treatment for ethnic and racially diverse patient populations.

Testing and evaluation are typically one of the last areas of mental health practice claimed by psychology alone, but assessment is a critical part of work as a counselor. The wellness-focused approach of the profession is in some ways at odds with the labeling required of evaluation, assessment, and interpretation, but these are an undeniable reality of clinical practice in the era of managed care. The chapter includes seven cases related to a section of the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics examined carefully using the Garcia, Cartwright, Winston, and Borzuchowska’s (2003) Transcultural Integrative model. This chapter highlights the ways in which assessment in general can become a complex area of practice, including, but not limited to, using diagnosis as a tool for billing, validity of assessment instruments administered to clients, diagnosis and wellness principles, and scope of competence.