Practice What We Teach: Promoting Wellness in a Clinical Mental Health Counseling Masters Program

ABSTRACT

Wellness strategies are important components of ethical practice for professional counselors. Therefore, wellness instruction must be included within counselor education programs; yet, many struggles to effectively integrate wellness instruction within the core curriculum. This article describes how a small clinical mental health counseling masters program implemented a wellness initiative to benefit both students and faculty during their accreditation process. Efforts to infuse wellness instruction began at the admissions interview and continued to the end of internship training. In addition, an empirically validated wellness inventory with an accompanying workbook was distributed to all internship students and faculty.

KEYWORDS:

• Wellness
• counselor education
• self-care
• well-being
• 5F-WEL
• creativity in counseling

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.