The Field

Counseling is a professional activity that involves helping clients, individually or in groups, or as couples and families, deal with various career, vocational, educational, and emotional problems. From the depressed and lonely college student to the business executive at midlife experiencing decreasing levels of career satisfaction to the couple where one partner has been unfaithful in the relationship, counseling is the intervention that numerous individuals turn to each year as the challenges and stress of daily living exceed their normal coping abilities. Counseling is practiced by counselors, social workers, psychiatric nurses, psychologists, and psychiatrists. While the demarcation is not absolute, counseling is sometimes differentiated from psychotherapy in that the latter deals more with mental illnesses and psychological disorders while the former is more concerned with normative stresses, adjustment difficulties, and life transitions (e.g., adjusting to unemployment or going through a divorce). Yet others have maintained that counseling and psychotherapy are quite similar activities and represent different sides of the same coin. In the current encyclopedia, we have adopted this latter perspective and counseling and psychotherapy are used interchangeably depending on the problem being treated as well as the context of the intervention.

Within the United States, traditionally, there have been four recognized mental health professions, which include Psychiatry, Psychology, Social Work, and Nursing in terms of insurance reimbursement of mental health services. Counseling can be provided to their clients by each of these mental health professionals. Within the field of Psychology, there are four major applied specialties in professional psychology which include Counseling Psychology, Clinical Psychology, School Psychology, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology are considered health service specialties while Industrial/Organizational Psychology is not. There is considerable overlap in the training and practice of Clinical and Counseling Psychology, and a few clinical and counseling training programs are housed within the same university department.

Both Clinical Psychology and Counseling Psychology can be differentiated from Psychiatry by the fact that the latter professionals are first trained to be physicians (receiving a medical degree) who go on to obtain specialty training (psychiatric residencies and fellowships) and can prescribe medications. Until recently, psychologists could not prescribe medications while psychiatrists could. This difference has changed considerably with the movement towards gaining prescription privileges for psychologists with special post-doctoral training. Another important distinction between psychiatrists and psychologists is that the majority of the former group tends to have admitting privileges in hospitals for their patients while the latter group does not, important for mental health professionals treating patients with severe mental illnesses who often require hospitalization.

As an applied specialty in Psychology that focuses on health and mental health, Counseling Psychology uses an extensive array of assessment and intervention strategies to help individuals, families, groups and organizations with their educational, developmental, and adjustment difficulties. While a small subset of counseling psychologists do focus on health issues, the majority of them focus instead on mental health in either their research or practice. The breadth of the activities undertaken by counseling psychologists has often resulted in their being referred to as the “general practitioners” of psychological specialties.

With a long-standing tradition of focusing more on clients' strengths and assets as opposed to their [Page xxvi]deficits and pathology, counseling psychologists are different from clinical psychologists along four main inter-related dimensions: (a) they tend to provide interventions and treatment for persons who are experiencing adjustment difficulties and moderate levels of psychological problems as opposed to severe psychopathology, (b) they are more likely to use short-term interventions, (c) they tend to provide these interventions in outpatient as opposed to inpatient facilities, and (d) they are unique among applied psychologists in providing individual career counseling and educational interventions. However, in providing individual counseling and psychotherapy, they are quite similar to clinical psychologists in using some of the same theories, models, and approaches.

The Social Work degree is primarily a practitioner degree with limited training in conducting science. As a mental health profession, most social workers complete the MSW (Master's of Social Work) which is a two-year master's degree. Most social workers eventually seek certification, to provide mental health services in private practice or various mental health agencies. Like clinical and counseling psychologists, social workers can provide therapy to clients with mental health problems, and similar to a majority of their psychology colleagues, social workers also cannot prescribe medicines for mental health problems. Social workers and psychiatrists can also be distinguished from counseling psychologists by the fact that they do not receive any training in psychological testing and assessment. In psychiatric hospitals, VA's, and community mental health centers, clinical and counseling psychologists are charged with engaging in the bulk of the psychological testing and test report preparation.

Within Nursing, only those who are trained as psychiatric nurses are considered mental health professionals and can engage in private practice of counseling and psychotherapy. Even though psychiatric nurses can engage in such private practice, the majority of them tend to work in mental health hospitals or agencies. As a health profession, psychiatric nursing is closely aligned with the medical specialty of psychiatry and is an integral member of the interdisciplinary mental health team in most psychiatric hospitals. As such, they are more likely to be found in inpatient than outpatient mental health facilities, though nurse-practitioners (those who can prescribe certain psychotropic medications) are becoming more common in some mental health agencies to alleviate the workload burden on psychiatrists. Like social workers, they do not obtain any training in scientific research or psychological testing when contrasted with counseling or clinical psychologists.

A fifth profession, which is closely aligned with Counseling Psychology and often confused with it, is that of the Counseling field. Unlike counseling psychologists who are trained primarily as psychologists, masters and doctoral degree counselors receive training in counseling programs that are not accredited by the American Psychological Association and therefore cannot be licensed as psychologists. Instead, counselors are trained in counseling programs typically accredited by the Council on Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). These counselors typically go on to achieve state licensure as professional counselors. While the training between the two groups is quite similar, a majority of the counselors are trained at the masters level whereas counseling psychologist are required to have a doctorate in order to be licensed and to practice independently. While some are active in both, counseling psychologists tend to belong to and participate in the American Psychological Association whereas counselors tend to belong to and participate in the American Counseling Association.

Rationale for the Encyclopedia

When Nancy Hale from Sage approached me about editing the encyclopedia back in 2002, I hesitated since I knew that editing an encyclopedia would be very time consuming and would take away from my program of research and other professional activities. Yet, I accepted the invitation because of two of my strongest beliefs regarding psychology. First, I had learned and remembered in graduate school Kurt Lewin's famous dictum: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Second, as I became involved in the American Psychological Association, I learned about this wonderful idea from George Miller in his 1969 Presidential address about “Giving Psychology Away.” The idea that Psychology should not be locked in academic journals and research labs but given away freely to the public so that we could fulfill the APA mission of “promoting human welfare” made a great deal of sense to me. Therefore, the primary rationale for this encyclopedia is the combination of those two powerful ideas of “giving psychology away” and sharing “practical theories” with the public.

Whether performed by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, psychiatric nurses or counselors, thousands of professionals throughout this country and elsewhere in the world are providing counseling services to their fellow human beings in helping them address and resolve the variety of problems of living that exceeds their coping resources and social support. The purpose of the current Encyclopedia of Counseling is to provide a comprehensive overview of the theories, models, techniques and challenges involved in this professional activity called counseling. It was designed to be the definitive resource for members of the public who are interested in learning about the science and practice of counseling. It will also be a useful resource for undergraduate and graduate students as well as professionals from other specialties to learn about counseling in all its forms and manifestations.

Content and Organization

By covering all of the major theories, approaches, and contemporary issues in counseling, the encyclopedia includes close to 600 entries. To enable the reader to understand the major approaches and themes within the field of counseling, the current encyclopedia has been divided into four volumes: (1) changes and challenges facing counseling, (2) personal and emotional counseling, (3) cross-cultural counseling, and (4) career counseling. However, each volume will also contain a cross-volume Reader's Guide and a cross-referencing system to entries in other volumes. In this way, we have created a flexible encyclopedia that can be used together as a set or separately by volume depending on the need of the user.

How the Encyclopedia was Created

Nancy Hale from Sage contacted Frederick Leong about the possibility of editing an Encyclopedia of Counseling in the summer of 2002. Following on some preliminary e-mail exchanges, Nancy moved over to the Journals Division of Sage and Arthur Pomponio took over as the Acquisition Editor for the encyclopedia. After additional discussions between Leong and Pomponio, it was decided that given the breadth of the Counseling field, the encyclopedia would consist of 4 volumes and approximately 150 entries per volume. Leong also suggested the novel approach of organizing the encyclopedia so that each volume covered a specific area of Counseling while maintaining the alphabetical ordering of entries within each volume.

Since Leong had also served as Associate Editor for International and Cross-Cultural entries under the senior editorship of Anthony Marsella for the APA/Oxford Encyclopedia of Psychology (8 volumes, Alan Kazdin served as Editor-in-Chief), he suggested using a similar organizational structure for the Encyclopedia of Counseling. Specifically, Leong would serve as Editor-in-Chief with the assistance of a Senior Editor to oversee each volume. The Senior Editor would in turn appoint an Associate Editor to help with the volume. In addition, this editorial team of 9 individuals would be guided by an Advisory Board.

Once the focus of the encyclopedia and the organizational structure of the four volumes were in place, Leong submitted a formal proposal to Sage which sent it out for external review. Upon receiving positive review of the proposal, Rolf Janke, then-Executive Editor of Sage, met with Frederick Leong at the University of Tennessee in December 2003 to review and sign the contract to initiate the project. In consultation with Janke and Pomponio, Leong appointed some of the leading figures of the field to serve on the [Page xxx]Advisory Board. The Board consisted of individuals from a variety of groups within the Counseling field. Members of the Board include Patricia Arredondo (incoming President of the American Counseling Association at that time), Charles Gelso (former editor of the Journal of Counseling Psychology and eventually Editor of Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice and Training), Puncky Heppner (incoming President of the Society for Counseling Psychology of the American Psychological Association at that time), Francis Lu (Professor of Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco and leading authority on cross-cultural competence training in Psychiatry), Paula Nurius (Professor of Social Work at the University of Washington and an author of several books with Sage), and Derald Wing Sue (leading author and authority on cross-cultural counseling).

With the Advisory Board in place, the Senior Editors of the volumes were appointed next with Elizabeth Altmaier (University of Iowa) serving as Editor of Volume 1, Howard E. A (Tony) Tinsley (Professor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University) serving as Editor of Volume 2. Madonna Constantine (Teachers College, Columbia University) was appointed as Editor of Volume 3 and W. Bruce Walsh (Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University) accepted the appointment to be Editor of Volume 4. Each of these Volume Editors then appointed their Associate Editors: Brian Johnson (Volume 1), Suzanne Lease (Volume 2), Roger Worthington (Volume 3), and Paul Hartung (Volume 4).

The next step involved generating the headword list of entries of the encyclopedia. Based on a review of the leading textbooks and handbooks in Counseling and Counseling Psychology, an initial list was generated by the Editor-in-Chief. This list was then sent to each of the Senior and Associate Editors for the 4 volumes for their review as to which entries fit best in their volume. As a result of this review, some entries were dropped and new ones were added. Based on this review and consultation across volumes, the penultimate list of entries for each volume was decided upon and then sent to the Advisory Board for their comment and suggestion. Using the feedback from the Board, another round of additions and deletions was conducted which resulted in the final list of entries. Next the challenge of recruiting the hundreds of contributors to write the entries began.

When the Encyclopedia of Counseling began in earnest in 2004 with the appointment of the editorial team and advisory board, Sage had just implemented their Web-based tool for their Reference Division, the Sage Reference Tracking (SRT) system. The SRT was to prove to be an invaluable tool for the editorial team since it allow the management of contracts, submissions, revisions and acceptance of entries via the Web. Just a few years before, Leong had had to manage the entries assigned to him for the Encyclopedia of Psychology (APA/Oxford University Press) via hard copies and the U.S. Postal Service!

As a massive undertaking (9 editors, 4 volumes, almost 600 entries and over 1 million words), the encyclopedia took 4 years to complete and was finally published in 2008.

It was truly a team effort harnessing the efficiency of the Internet and involving hundreds of scholars, researchers, practitioners and editorial staff at Sage.

Acknowledgments

As indicated above, the major undertaking of producing a four-volume encyclopedia would not be possible without the host of dedicated individuals. It is only fitting to acknowledge here the important contributions of all these individuals. To begin with, the encyclopedia is the product of the hundreds of contributors who wrote the entries and our acknowledgements should appropriately start with them. The contributors were ably guided by the editorial team who provided numerous hours of consultation and editing of the entries (Elizabeth Altmaier, Howard E. A. Tinsley, Madonna Constantine, Bruce Walsh, Brian Johnson, Suzanne Lease, Roger Worthington, and Paul Hartung). Both the editorial team and I owe much to the Advisory Board who provided important input into both the structure of the encyclopedia as well as the selection of the entries (Patricia Arredondo, Charles Gelso, Puncky Heppner, Francis Lu, Paula Nurius, and Derald Wing Sue).

Within Sage, there were many individuals who were pivotal in the launching of the encyclopedia (Nancy Hale, Arthur Pomponio, Kassie Graves, Rolf Janke) and seeing it through to production (Eileen Gallaher, Sara Tauber, and Carole Maurer), and we are grateful for their contributions as well as the scores of individuals in production, contracts, copyediting, typesetting, and cover design. Please know that we could not have done it without you. Thank you.

I have also been fortunate to have good colleagues and support within the Psychology Department at Michigan State University to carry out this project. While at the University of Tennessee, I was very ably assisted by my secretary Kim Kirby as well as talented graduate students (Annie Gupta, Huaiyu Zhang, Dwight Tolliver) and helpful colleagues (John Lounsbury and Mike Nash).

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Sandy, and my daughters, Kate and Emily, who supported me throughout this project and only occasionally asked, “It's Saturday, why are you going to the office?” I also want to thank my Mom and Dad who instilled in me the work ethic to see projects to completion.