Career Interview: Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor - Assignment Example

? Career Interview- LPCC and LMFT Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) refers to the awardedto professionals who have studied and dealt with mental health. Their work revolves around counseling and caring mentally for substance abusers in various states. To acquire this title, one must hold masters or doctorate degree in counseling or any related fields. Their training on mental disorder treatment of emotional and behavioral problems requires them to work with individuals, families, and groups of the affected. Also required is a supervised post-masters degree clinical experience, which must last for a minimum of 3000 hours. This clinical experience is done within the two years of course completion, after which one must sit and pass the National Counselor Examination and/or the National Certified Mental Health Counselor Examination. Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (LMFT) are also mental health professionals trained to families, couples, and individuals with emotional, mental, and interpersonal disorders. Just like LPCs, LMFTs also require masters or doctorate degree in Marriage and family therapy or any other related field. One must also perform 3000 hours of supervised clinical experience and pass the national board exams. What is interesting from all this is the fact that LMFT, contrary to popular belief, is uniquely different from LPC and other counseling professions. This is because of all the mental health practitioners, LMFT are the only ones who can perform conjoint therapy as well as group and individual therapies. Being a mental health practitioner is advantageous in a number of ways. First, there is an increased job demand for the profession implying that many mental health counselors are guaranteed of jobs after their studies. Their work places include offices in research institutions, private practice, and public arenas like prisons, hospitals, and schools. In addition, mental counselors receive the satisfaction of helping a wide range of people with various needs. This is advantageous as the motivation of mental health counselors is to help abused children and suicidal individuals, among others, successfully. However, this profession is not without its disadvantages. First, the job is very demanding and stressful and at the end of the day, one remains burnt out. The second and most important disadvantage of this profession is that the patients can turn out to be dangerous, especially if they are mentally challenged and having criminal records. I was surprised to learn that many people perceive mental therapy as meant for people with very serious issues of mental instability. They assume that for one to being therapy, the person must have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. The truth is that therapy makes life better, be it in terms of relationships, stress, grief, and disorders. In this profession, mental counselors are often faced with many difficulties in their work place. One of such challenge occurs when patients ‘fall in love’ with counselors. In most cases, patients have trouble establishing and maintaining intimate relationships in their normal lives. When they find this attention and compassion from counselors, they are emotionally attached to them. In as much as love is an interesting and pleasant issue, these emotions have proven difficult for counselors as patients lose focus and fail to perform as required in therapy sessions. There are millions of people with mental illnesses as well as other millions with substance abuse problems. Dual occurrence of patients with both substance abuse as well as mental disorders is also on the rise today. In most cases, substance abuse is common among the mentally ill. Due to this, it is clear that there is a strong relationship between substance abuse and the occurrence of mental disorders. This can be attributed to the side effects of mental illnesses like anxiety, low self-esteem, restlessness, paranoia, and depression, which leaves such patients with the need to self medicate. This becomes a habit with time, turning the patients into substance abusers. Another factor that can cause mentally ill patients to abuse drugs is the side effects of psychiatric drugs. Some cause hallucinations that leave patients depressed and paranoid, thus they turn to drugs in an attempt to stop these effects. On the other hand, some drugs have been proven to cause mental instability. This is particularly true for adolescents who are addicted to drugs as they are mentally affected later in life. This is because drugs affect their cognitive abilities and social development and when this happens, anxiety and depression disorders are just a knock away. However, there are risk factors that cause mental instability and substance abuse, like traumatic experience. The most preferable population for me is teenagers. This is because by listening to them and solving their problems fulfills my passion for helping out others. I love the challenge brought out by the complexity of teenage adolescent stage of life. After counseling them successfully, I am relieved and consoled by the futures saved, since teenagers still have more to live for in life. Every day I look forward to assisting confused teenagers, get back on track, and take control of their lives. In therapy, I apply the eclecticism theoretical approach for my patients. I find this approach more effective than the others do because it makes use of almost all the other individual theories of psychodynamics and psychoanalysis as well as the humanistic, cognitive, and behavioral theories (Grohol, 2013). With this combined effort, I always succeed in my sessions because I apply the best-suited approach to patients depending on my analysis of them. I analyze what could be the cause of their behavior (behaviorism) and thoughts (cognitive) that make them ill, meanwhile treating the patients as their own individuals (humanistic). Listening to people’s traumatic and emotional problems on a daily basis is not easy, especially because the profession requires the practitioner to empathize with the patients. At the end of the day, even mental health counselors are affected by these sessions. To deal with the pressure created at work, are advised to check their wellness frequently, as they are instrumental in the wellness of their patients. Personally, I attend peer support groups with other counselors where we share our problems at work, like failing to balance family life and work. The whole group participates in finding solutions that best suit our conditions, in turn helping ourselves be better counselors. In short, I also attend ‘shrink’ sessions. Being a licensed professional is a lifelong passion. This is because I love social work and enjoy working with people, especially the disadvantaged and this has been my internal motivation. Apart from that, I was born of a family struggling with drug problem. All through my childhood, all I remember of my dad is the shouting and breaking glasses, the constant smell of alcohol and no time for anyone. This took a toll on everybody, especially my mum who had to be ‘the man’ in the house. She did her best to provide for us and stay strong but I could hear her sob in the shower. At the age of eight, barely old enough to grasp the meaning of life, the phone rang with a message that there had been an accident. My father was driving under the influence and lost control of the car while picking up his bottle. All through my school life, I have had this dire need to ‘fix’ people like my father and prevent further losses due to drug abuse and psychological disorders. References Grohol J. (2013) Types of Therapies: Theoretical Orientations and Practices of Therapists Psychcentral Retrieved 17 November 2013 from psychcentral.com/therapy.htm Read More