Disability in Counselor Education: Perspectives from the United States
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Disability in Counselor Education: Perspectives from the United States Michele Rivas 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This manuscript examines the US counseling profession’s long-standing curricular and institutional commitments around diversity and clinical excellence that pertain to disability as a multicultural identity. Specifically, the author situates training paucities, multidisciplinary contributions, and the recent emergence of disability-related counseling competencies to illuminate curricular and programmatic implications for counselor training in the US context. Keywords Disability . Counselor education . Multicultural competence . United States
Introduction In the United States (US), people with disabilities (56.7 million) represent the largest minority (Brault 2012; Drum et al. 2011). It has been determined that 8.6% of persons under the age of 65 have a disability in the US (Brault 2012; US Census Bureau 2016), and 35% of those engage in counseling services because of mental health conditions that impact their daily functioning (Smart and Smart 2006; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) 2014). Moreover, given the fabric of intersecting identities represented in this minority, the counseling needs of disabled clients are likewise varied and complex, requiring behavioral healthcare educational systems to secure training that is responsive to this population’s specific needs. The counseling profession has increasingly recognized new guiding forces that afford counselors with enhanced opportunities for service to minorities. Specifically, multiculturalism and social justice advocacy currently fuel complex and intersectional conceptualizations of identity in the counseling work with marginalized communities (Ratts and Pedersen 2014). Despite the significance of expanded and multidimensional conceptualizations of identity in the counseling discourse, the multicultural emphasis in counselor training is typically limited to concerns of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class (Pieterse et al. 2009), and underemphasizes
* Michele Rivas [email protected]
1
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling
disability issues in counseling clinical practice and counselor preparation (Rivas and Hill 2018; Smart and Smart 2006). As a result, there remains a lack of salience and commitment to disability as a social marker woven into the identities that counselors serve. The purpose of this article is to highlight the profession’s long-standing institutional commitments around diversity and clinical excellence, and to identify issues that pertain to disability as a multicultural identity, and that are in direct relation to counselor education in the US and elsewhere. Specifically, the article initially reviews the profession’s multicultural commitments and the institutional initiatives that influence multicultural preparation of counselors, and to consider these in relation to dis
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