Training the Next Generation of Counseling at MHCC

Photo provided by MHCC Marketing

With mental health concerns more openly addressed and far less stigmatized than in the past, there’s been surging interest in the counseling career field. Many students want to be part of helping their community to heal.

May is National Mental Health month – so I sat down with Karen Green, MHCC’s Director of the Mental Health, Social Services, Addiction Counseling A.A. Program, to talk about her offerings here at Mt. Hood. As it turns out, Green’s program is excellently positioned to help these students quickly engage and advance.

“Seniors in high school may think ‘I’m interested in becoming a therapist. I’m going to major in psychology,’ ” she said. “But that’s not how you become a therapist. You become a therapist through my degree, and then you go into either social work or counseling.”

To become a professional therapist or counselor, a practitioner needs a master’s degree and a license. The two-year A.A. program at MHCC is a working degree in Mental Health, which provides the first step of a six-year program. This is a much more direct track, as opposed to the more traditional psychology approach, in which a student must first earn a doctorate in psychology, “and then still you have to get a license. So it would be the long way around,” Green explained. “But not a lot of people know that.”

“This is the first step towards getting a master’s (degree) and a license to be a therapist. Many students think they need to start with psychology, but this is another path which gives them more focus on working through their own issues and building relationship skills for helping their cohort and future clients.”

WORKING ON HEALING

A recent visit to one of Green’s classes found that her students appeared highly energized and enthused. She smiled as she noted that “relationship [building] is a huge piece of our program,” using her own connection with students as the starting block.

Green notes that many are interested in mental health because they have struggled with it themselves, or they weren’t treated well in their primary attachment relationships. Going through her class helps them to rewrite their stories, utilizing the support of a caring cohort in which she models how to “hold space,” and from that, the students learn to hold space for one another.

“You’ve got to do your own [mental health healing] work in order to become a good mental health helper,” she said. Students learn how to identify when they are triggered themselves, how to identify their personal warning signs, and what to do about it. The MHCC students are learning not only about their own mental health and how to take care themselves, but they’re also learning how to create and hold space for their clients. “It’s like a working psychology degree,” Green said.

As a part of the A.A. degree, students go out into the community to get 480 hours of interning with various types of agencies and groups, such as corrections or treatment facilities, K-12 schools, and state/county human services departments.

Beyond the invaluable experience, many of the agencies will even pay for the student to enroll for a transfer degree to go on and complete their bachelor’s degree.

“A lot of our students are graduating and getting jobs paying pretty darn well out in the community and they’re doing mental health in all aspects,” Green said. 

ADVOCATES FOR ALL

The vibrant students seen exiting Green’s practicum seminar class have good reason for their energy.

“[T]hey’re sharing what went on this week and what they did and how they impacted their clients, and then they take turns summarizing,” she explained. The course is similar to a support group, where the students work together to review the events of their week, learning and practicing the skills of “summarization, reflection, reframing, and pulling out feelings,” she said.

Her program also teaches students how to write to legislators and learn how to effectively advocate for their clients.

“A lot of our students are fired up about social justice issues,” which Green helps them to process, she said. “We talk a lot about advocacy. We talk, we write a lot of legislators about certain things that we feel like need to be changed… it’s a part of social work, for sure, and policy change, and really knowing how to advocate for our clients.

“Because our bottom line is, everybody deserves to be treated with dignity. Every single person, no matter what, you know – gender, color, stability, status, all of it, addiction, no addiction – we’re here to fight for that,” she said.

Green urges all Mt. Hood students and staff to seek out help, if they need it, and make use of the free counseling at the college’s counseling center, where sometimes it feels like more of her interns than students are taking advantage of the no-cost services. Meantime, the Mt. Hood program seems ideal for the kinesthetic learner who learns through the process of doing, more than through reading. It can be empowering by inspiring and building the inner fires of the students to have an impact on their community.

To learn more, stop by the MHCC Student Hub or check the program website. Students also may email Green directly to see if there is space to sit in on one of her classes, “because it does have its own kind of alchemy,” she said, and feel if that energy is right for you!