Читать книгу Counseling Leaders and Advocates - Группа авторов - Страница 44

Advocacy and leadership in counseling are firmly rooted in our history (Kiselica & Robinson, 2001), established both by leaders from within the profession and by those from other professions who have inspired our humanistic, multicultural, social justice focus. To be sure, counselors have not always acted with social justice at the forefront of their efforts, and mental health professionals have, at times, perpetuated oppressive and harmful systems (Fox et al., 2009). As counselors, we must be careful not to idealize our profession or the leaders within it. Nonetheless, it is important to highlight those who have stepped forward with novel ideas and actions to meet the needs of the community and to advocate for social change.

The first of these leaders, Frank Parsons, is known as the founder of both the social justice movement in counseling and the counseling profession itself (Capuzzi & Gross, 2017; Zytowski, 2001). Parsons was a vocational guidance worker in Boston during the early 1900s who organized career preparation and support for immigrant youth while providing services free of charge. He, along with others working at the Vocation Bureau, helped disenfranchised youth find jobs that spoke to their interests and prepared them for work. Parsons aimed to meet the needs of these workers and the community, including local labor leaders, government officials, leaders in the arts, college presidents, and religious leaders (Zytowski, 2001).

Around this same time, Clifford Beers (1908) published his famous book, A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography. In this book, Beers describes his experience of being detained in a psychiatric institution. Beers was not a clinician; he was a patient who suffered from chronic depression, and he observed the indignities suffered by those with mental health disorders who lived in psychiatric institutions (e.g., state psychiatric hospitals). These indignities included isolation and seclusion in straightjackets, little care from staff, forced oral and nasal medication, and many other treatments not known to the general public at the time. Subsequently, Beers started the mental hygiene movement, which advocated for reform of psychiatric institutions and urged that they become more humane in their care. Through this process, Beers addressed the stigma of mental health that existed in the public domain (Capuzzi & Gross, 2017; Parry, 2010). He, along with psychiatrists, physicians, and philanthropists inspired by his words, developed associations nationally and internationally to improve care for those with mental health disorders. One such association, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, was at the forefront of lobbying efforts to petition the U.S. Congress for new laws to improve the conditions in psychiatric facilities (Neukrug, 2016). This association continues today under the name Mental Health America (n.d.). Through Beers’s own experiences in mental health care, he became an advocate, leading and inspiring others to improve conditions in psychiatric institutions and, in a larger way, inspiring a humanistic perspective that was emerging within the counseling profession.

Carl Rogers wrote Counseling and Psychotherapy in 1942, inspiring counseling professionals to adopt a humanistic perspective and extend their practice beyond vocational guidance (Neukrug, 2016). His approach challenged earlier psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches by recognizing the power of empathy and human potential for health and healing. In addition to proposing a paradigm shift toward an egalitarian relationship with clients, Rogers was an advocate for social justice and argued against the social injustices of his time, such as McCarthyism and political oppression in Northern Ireland and Brazil (Barfield, 2019; Demanchick & Kirschenbaum, 2008). It should be noted that Rogers has been criticized for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency (Demanchick & Kirschenbaum, 2008), which funded research on personality that is now considered ethically questionable.

Overlapping interests have long existed between counseling and psychology, with leaders affiliating across professional associations and publishing in both American Counseling Association (ACA) and American Psychological Association (APA) journals. This was especially true throughout the emergence of the multicultural and social justice movements, which some consider the fourth and fifth theoretical forces of the profession (Pack-Brown et al., 2008). Counseling psychologists Derald Wing Sue and Patricia Arrendondo (a past president of ACA) took leading roles in calling psychologists and counselors to task for their training and practices, which were “monocultural” and often ineffective with racial and ethnic minorities (Sue et al., 1992). These and other leaders established the first multicultural counseling competencies adopted by the counseling profession (Arrendondo et al., 1996), which would evolve into the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (Ratts et al., 2015) that recognize the multifaceted and intersecting privileged and oppressed identities.

The social justice counseling movement was largely influenced by leaders in social psychology and education. One such individual, Ignacio Martín-Baró, was a social psychologist who practiced in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. Martín-Baró, a Jesuit priest, advocated for individuals mistreated and subjected to oppression and violence at the hands of their own governments during political upheavals in Latin America (Lykes & Sibley, 2014). One key aspect to Martín-Baró’s work was an approach that was not directed to the poor but was designed to be of the poor, a theme reflective of Beers’s efforts on mental health reforms. This included understanding what the needs of those with mental health issues are, rather than what psychologists and counselors assume those needs should be. Martín-Baró’s philosophy and practices aligned with Paulo Freire’s (1970/2006) view of critical pedagogy, which is commonly reflected in the social justice literature. This focus calls on providers to understand the historical context of the people with whom they are working as well as their ecological context (Cook, 2015), understanding how oppressive forces influence individuals and communities.

Each of these leaders advocated for clients in the field and through reforms within the profession. Client advocacy includes work done to provide better treatment and conditions for potential clients as a whole, whether focusing on the community level or nationally or internationally. Counselors, as effective agents of change, remove barriers for clients as well as for the profession, particularly when the barriers inhibit serving those in need.