SPECIAL FOCUS
How to keep you rself — and your practice — thriving
Are We Okay ? Switching to Telehealth : The Impact on Our Practices — and Our Feelings About Our Work
Every workplace has its hazards , and the counseling profession is no exception . Clinician self-care is often framed as a moral imperative that can and should guide our work as Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselors ( LCMHCs ), and yet so many of us struggle to practice what we preach .
Why is this ?
We provide services to others , but we often forget or forgo the need to tend to ourselves . Our research team , based in the greater Seattle area , has been active in trying to assess how counselor wellness has fared through the COVID-19 pandemic , and specifically with the mass migration of so many counseling hours from in-person sessions to telehealth .
The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for us to consider counselor wellness during a time of significant and sudden change to the counseling profession . Future crises — spurred by natural disasters , other diseases , and war , among other causes — are also likely to affect counselor wellness and to bring similar opportunity for reflection and growth , for both individual practitioners and for the counseling field as a whole .
In this article , we will detail some of what we have learned about how the structural changes associated with the counseling profession ’ s collective shift to telehealth has impacted counselors ’ sense of wellness , and we will then offer some suggestions for next steps for us all to consider .
Our findings are rooted in a qualitative study of the lived experience of Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselors in the state of Washington . We hope you ’ ll examine our findings in light of your own lived experiences , by way of following along with the questions we ’ re asking and the directions our data has pointed us thus far .
We Are Important — Not Only Our Counseling Effectiveness
We set out on this particular research journey , in part because most of the research being done on telehealth has to do with treatment efficacy . Research questions around treatment effectiveness seem to trump inquiries into counselor wellness . Our team was not satisfied with this all-too-familiar trend . We wanted to remedy the dearth of voices speaking about the lived experiences of the counselors themselves . So here we are !
As mental health counselors , our work has to be enough about us that it is not about us ; without a frame that can hold both counselors and clients alike , compromised work and burnout are likely to
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Doug Shirley , EdD , MDiv , LMHC , and Shaquille Sinclair delivered an address at AMHCA ’ s 2023 Annual Conference on the structural changes on clinician wellness caused by telehealth
Doug Shirley is associate professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology . He has been practicing and teaching in the fields of counseling and psychology since 1999 . In his private practice , Doug counts it a joy to be able to work with helping and healing professionals who are interested in tending to their own health and wellness . We are all in this together . Doug can be reached at dshirley @ theseattleschool . edu .
Shaquille Sinclair is a licensed mental health counselor associate and has been working in private practice since graduating from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology last June . Shaquille enjoys working with people who are processing late-stage identity formation , healing from the trauma of institutional backlash , and engaging attachment wounds . He is eager to connect to fellow students of the human experience and can be reached at shaquille . s @ sstraumacounseling . com .
The Advocate Magazine 2024 , Issue # 1 American Mental Health Counselors Association ( AMHCA ) www . amhca . org 15