“…The split between Community Counseling and Mental Health Counseling standards affected the counseling profession's ability to view itself as one discipline. It sparked a decade of debates nationwide regarding what differentiated community counseling from mental health counseling (Cowger, Hinkle, DeRidder, & Erk, 1991; Hershenson & Berger, 2001; Wilcoxon, 1990) and further complicated the profession's ability to define a single identity for its members. Furthermore, it created a two‐tiered system of educational training standards, because graduation from an accredited mental health counseling program required more hours of education and 300 additional hours of clinical internship than did programs preparing graduates to work at schools, colleges, or other community‐based settings.…”