The Changing Role of the Counselor

Abstract

The counseling profession is nearly 100 years old. For most of those years, “counselor” usually meant school or career counselor. However, since the early 1980s, the counseling profession has undergone dramatic changes, evidenced most strongly in the emergence and rapid growth of the specialization of mental health or community agency counseling (West, Hosie, & Mackey, 1987) as well as the decline, during the 1980s, of opportunities for school counselors (Ritchie, Piazza, & Lewton, 1991). By the early 1990s, graduate programs to train mental health counselors, including community agency counselors and marriage and family counselors, outnumbered programs to train school counselors (Cowger, Hinkle, DeRidder, & Erk, 1991). In fact, Fong (1990) proposed that all counseling should be described as mental health counseling because that, in fact, is its focus. This book will also take a broad view of mental health counseling.