Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of Addictions & Offender Counseling

Substance abuse counselor certification requirements: is it time for a change?

Article Excerpt
The minimum professional training requirements of 32 state certifying bodies for substance abuse counselors were analyzed. Only 14 of the certifying boards included any of the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs core knowledge areas in their training components for Certified Addictions Counselors. Specific training in counseling and drug and alcohol treatment issues also appeared to be minimal. The lack of specific drug and alcohol training brings the quality of preparation for substance abuse counselors into question.

**********

The development of minimum preparation standards for the counseling profession and the substance abuse counseling profession has taken separate but parallel courses. Professional counselor training standards were first defined by the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (1973). These standards established the graduate degree with a counseling core curriculum as the minimum acceptable level of academic preparation for the professional counselor. This effort was followed by the formation of the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) in 1981 and the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) in 1982.

The definition of minimum preparation standards for substance abuse counselors began at about the same time. In the early 1970s, Congress passed the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Act, which committed large sums of money in the form of block grants to states for the treatment of alcoholic patients and for the training of individuals responsible for the care of this population (Banken & McGovern, 1992). Congress also established the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which signaled the beginning of specialized training with an emphasis on counseling skills to meet the needs of alcohol- and other drug-dependent persons (Banken & McGovern, 1992). Development of private substance abuse counselor certification boards began at the state level, and two national organizations emerged as envoys for the substance abuse treatment industry--the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors (NAADAC) and the International Certification Reciprocity Consortium.

The specialty of addictions counseling emerged at a time when other professional groups avoided this client population. In the 1960s, most physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers did not want to become involved in addiction treatment. Some were repelled by the nature of the problem, the nature of the patients, or by the inadequate reimbursement--both public and private (Primm, 1992). It would have been impossible to marshal the number of trained psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists needed to match the rapidly burgeoning treatment population (Brown, 1993). There was a general reliance on substance abuse counselor certification boards, either at the state or national level, to provide qualified practitioners to meet the needs of this expanding treatment population.

Embodied in the movement toward certifying individuals to treat addictions was a reluctance to require formal academic graduate preparation as a prerequisite for the addictions counselor. Addictions counselor certification was centered on education and experience. Individuals had to meet certain education and training criteria for certification, which could be met by attending workshops, seminars, or college classes. Individuals were also required to work from 2 to 3 years as a counselor under supervision to meet the experiential criteria.

These separate processes of defining minimally acceptable training standards have produced two questions that have persisted for nearly three decades. The first question is whether substance abuse counseling is a distinct profession unto itself, or if it is a specialty of the counseling profession. Banken and McGovern (1992) surveyed alcohol and substance abuse counselors regarding their opinions on this question and found a...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!