This is an excerpt of the first portion of an article I had the honor to publish in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling. My thanks go to Rich Ponton, the JMHC editor for both his patience and for making this article possible. The first 835 words of the article follow. For the whole thing, you can go to the JMHC website: http://www.amhca.org/?page=jmhc

Competence in mental health counseling is inevitably complex and multidimensional. Ironically, the complexity can become overwhelming when well-intended professionals work together to identify the knowledge and skills counselors need to be considered competent. A good example of this is the standards defined in 2009 by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Program (CACREP, 2009). To establish competence in mental health counseling, the standards require that counselor training programs integrate into their curricula eight core knowledge-based standards and six specialty standards. The eight core standards are splintered into 67 learning objectives and the six specialty standards into 61 critical knowledge and skill components that must be measured as student learning outcomes (Minton & Gibson, 2012). To further elaborate the complexity, the American Mental Health Counseling Association (AMHCA, 2010) has its own Standards for the Practice of Mental Health Counseling.

The myriad standards mean that counselor educators and counseling students must determine exactly how the 128 CACREP competencies (many of which are clearly unrelated to actually doing counseling) and the AMHCA clinical and training standards together translate into mental health counselor competence. Although meeting this challenge can be intellectually exhilarating, moving from the standards to how mental health counselors should act in the room with clients is far from intuitive.

This article represents an effort to gather evidence-based practice (EBP) principles and describe them in terms of practical behaviors or approaches that contribute to counselor competence and positive client outcomes. Although considering the standards conceptually is necessary and sometimes helpful, the purpose of this article is to present a straightforward EBP model that can be tailored to fit different theoretical orientations and individual counselor styles.

What Is Evidence-Based Mental Health Counseling Practice?
Historically, the counseling profession has not had a strong science or research emphasis (Sexton, 2000; Yates, 2013). In fact, a PsycINFO title search of the top five professional counseling journals revealed only 12 articles over the past 15 years that had “evidence-based” or “empirically-supported” in their titles (the journals were Counselor Education and Supervision, Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation; Journal of Counseling and Development; Journal of Mental Health Counseling; and Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development). In a systematic review, Ray and colleagues (2011) reported that only 1.9% of articles in counseling journals are concerned with outcomes research. No wonder, as Yates (2013) wrote in Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation, “Despite the recommendations for infusing outcome research and evidence-based practices (EBPs) into the counseling profession, there still exists uncertainty and confusion from educators and students about what EBP is” (p. 41).

In some ways it is right and good that professional counselors have a less scientific orientation than related disciplines. After all, mental health counseling evolved, in part, as an alternative to treatments provided by psychologists and psychiatrists (Gladding, 2012). This less rigorously scientific approach may partly explain why the public usually views professional counselors as more “helpful, caring, friendly . . . , and understanding” than psychologists and psychiatrists (Warner & Bradley, 1991, p. 139). The purpose of this article is certainly not to make a case for professional counselors to become more rigidly scientific but rather to help counselors embrace practical and relevant scientific research while maintaining a friendly interpersonal style and a wellness-oriented professional identity (Mellin, Hunt, & Nichols, 2011).

Terminology
Like all words, the terms used to describe evidence-based counseling and psychotherapy are linguistic inventions designed to communicate important information. Unfortunately, evidence-based terminology has by now evolved into what might best be described as Babel-esque. Therefore, before outlining an evidence-based mental health counseling model, I look briefly into the politics, history, and usage of evidence-based terminology.

Evidence-based terminology originated in medicine, spilled over into psychology, and from there made its way to professional counseling, education, social work, prevention, business, and nearly every other corner of the first world. Recently I was at a conference where the keynote speaker described not including purple on Powerpoint slides as a best practice. Although no doubt the speaker’s comments were based on something, I was not convinced that the something had anything to do with scientific research.

In mental health treatment, at least some of the confusion about EBP originated in 1986, when Gerald Klerman, then head of the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), remarked in a speech to the Society for Psychotherapy Research (perhaps with irony) that “We must come to view psychotherapy as we do aspirin” (quoted in Beutler, 2009, p. 308). Klerman was promoting the medicalization of psychotherapy as a means to compete for limited health care dollars. He was advocating scientific analysis and application of psychotherapy for specific ailments. The use of aspirin as his medical analogy was ironic because, although the active ingredient in aspirin is well-known (acetyl salicylic acid), until the early 1980s little was known about how and why aspirin worked—and even today there remain mysteries about aspirin’s mechanism of action and range of application. However, like aspirin Klerman’s comments had a specific effect but also triggered gastrointestinal side effects in some professionals .