Using a Counselor Education Supervision Perspective in Teaching Psychopathology

The American Counseling Association (ACA, 2014) and the CACREP accreditation body (2024) have advocated for counselor professional identity to be a focus in the professional training for all counselors (Bray, 2020).  According to the CACREP Board of Directors, they believe in advancing the profession through quality and excellence in counselor education. They desire to ensure a fair consistent and ethical decision-making process, serve as responsible leaders in protecting the public, and understand the differences of the psychologist/psychiatric perspective verses counseling as a profession and in the application of services. In addition, the 2024 CACREP Standards were written with the intent to promote a unified professional counselor identity. Requirements are meant to ensure that students graduate with a strong professional counselor identity and with opportunities for specialization in identified practice areas. The Standards require that graduates demonstrate both knowledge and skill across the curriculum as well as professional dispositions first with respect to universal counselor functions and secondly with respect to their CACREP specialized practice areas (CACREP 2024 standards).  We believe that for professional counseling students, it is most advantageous to learn the important topic of psychopathology and diagnosis in a way that is supportive of CACREP, the ACA and its Code of Ethics, and ASERVIC principles from a bio-psycho-social-cultural-spiritual perspective. This includes diverse counselor supervisor educators, with their own unique expertise in a variety of areas of the DSM-5-TR who can prepare counseling students to explore their own unique professional identity as counselors to competently assess, diagnose, conceptualize, and provide optimum treatment to clients as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – 5-TR (DSM-5-TR) and per CACREP and ACA standards of practice. In addition to learning from this perspective, there are many additional ways taking a CES approach to teaching psychopathology can benefit the trainees and profession at large.  Using a Counselor Developmental Model, CES can teach and support students in understanding how to build their own counselor identity and a strong holistic case conceptualization foundation. This model of CES focused teaching includes elements such as Counselor Identity, developmental model of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diagnostic symptoms and with a wellness perspective. Including a core perspective of counselor worldview and understanding there are multiple tools to assess clients not only the DSM, CES can begin to see the need for students to build a foundation of understanding pathology from a decidedly counselor identity focus. Finally, there are additional elements offered in this model including foundational attachment theory, and many voices of expertise to support student learning and growth using cultural humility and critical thinking skills.

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approved for 1.0 CE clock hour in Diagnosis.

The Louisiana Counseling Association has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP #2019.  Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified.  LCA is solely responsible for all aspects of the program.