Professional counseling organizations tout the importance of wellness for counselors and counselors‐in‐training. The authors used a wellness‐focused supervision model with mental health practicum students to assess the model's degree of treatment effect at improving students' wellness over the course of the semester. Participants' demographics included three women, one man, three European Americans, and one Latino/a. Single‐case design results revealed that ongoing wellness‐focused interventions are helpful in improving participants' level of wellness; implications for practice are provided.
Many counselor education programs use experiential groups to help students learn group leadership skills, group concepts and develop self-awareness. However, little is known about these groups from the students' perspective. Qualitative methodology was employed and eleven master's students were interviewed regarding their perceptions of participating in an experiential group. Participants believed they developed both skills and knowledge about groupwork. Recommendations for counselor educators are presented.
This article explores how flow theory and the serious leisure perspective (SLP) can be integrated into mental health counseling. Although different counseling models have acknowledged the role of leisure in the counseling process, leisure is largely an unknown and superficial concept in the mental health counseling literature. Four broad-based pragmatic ideas regarding how flow theory and the SLP can be integrated into the counseling process include mental health counselors (1) understanding the concepts of serious leisure, casual leisure, project-based leisure, flow (enjoyment), and hedonistic pleasure; (2) becoming aware of various assessment instruments that measure flow and serious leisure; (3) using the provision characteristics of entering flow into the counseling process; and (4) empowering clients to becoming community change agents through serious leisure pursuit, resulting in flow experiences.One of troubling aspects of professionalism is that professionals develop a narrow frame of reference and are often so busy updating themselves within their field of vocation that they fail to learn about theories or practices from divergent fields of study. In studying the creative process, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) found that creative thinkers spend a tremendous amount of time learning a subject matter and then will often integrate it with a different field of study, including fields that sometimes appear to be very irrelevant. The purpose of this paper is to explain two different, yet overlapping, theories of leisure (flow theory and the serious leisure perspective) and then integrate these two theories of leisure into mental health counseling.The first section of this paper will explain how different counseling models acknowledge the role of leisure, but do not explain leisure with clarity, precision, depth, or breadth. The second part of this paper will explain flow theory and the serious leisure perspective (SLP). The latter part of this paper will attempt to integrate flow theory and the SLP within mental health counseling. The last section of this paper will outline future professional and research directions.
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