Counseling: A Comprehensive Profession (Merrill Counseling) 8th Edition

The most readable, practical, comprehensive overview of the roles and responsibilities of the professional counselor available―updated and improved to meet the needs of today’s counselors.

Long respected as the most comprehensive guide to the counseling profession available, Samuel Gladding’s text continues to emphasize counseling as a profession and counseling as an identity, while focusing on the roles and responsibilities of the professional counselor. Designed to ensure students get a head start in preparing for the professional challenges they will face in their futures as effective counselors, the book includes the latest research from counseling journals and other professional resources to show clearly the challenges of the profession that lie ahead. The new edition of the text contains an even stronger emphasis on counseling as a profession and counseling as an identity, along with new or expanded sections on wellness, trauma, social justice, theories, process, multiculturalism, diversity, rehabilitation, motivational interviewing, bullying, microaggression, international counseling, addiction, abuse, and ethical and legal issues within the counseling profession. This text is even more equipped to help students prepare for professional challenges and a lifetime as an effective counselor than ever before.

Among the text’s new features are:

• Counselors are kept current on the emerging trends in the field through over 240 updated and new references.
• The text is now more approachable for courses taught on a semester basis through a format consolidation from 20 to 18 chapters.
• Important information on the history of counseling (previously presented as an opening chapter in the Seventh edition) now appears in Appendix A, providing additional reading for those interesting in expanding their knowledge.
• Students and professors get a strong look at many of the main tenets of the major approaches to counseling through new charts that appear within the two chapters on theories and in Appendix B.
• A more in-depth knowledge of supervision is provided in the expanded section.
• The flow of counseling as a complete entity is made clearer that combines the topics of working in a counseling relationship, and closing or terminating a counseling relationship.
• Learning through visual cues is enhanced through the inclusion of over 40 new graphs and tables inserted throughout the text without interrupting the narrative around them.
• How to work effectively with diverse and multicultural populations is supported through information that reflects the changes in demographics in the United States today. Infused throughout the book is material on working in a diverse and multicultural climate.

Samuel T. Gladding is a professor in the Department of Counseling at Wake Forest University. He is a fellow in the American Counseling Association (ACA) as well and its former president. He has also served as president of the American Association of State Counseling Boards (AASCB) and president of Chi Sigma Iota (international counseling honorary). Gladding has authored numerous professional publications, including 45 books. Prominent among them are these texts by Pearson: Groups: A Counseling Specialty (2016), Family Therapy: History, Theory and Practice (2015), and Clinical Mental Health Counseling (with Deborah Newsome) (2014).

Twice a Fulbright Specialist (Turkey and China), Professor Gladding has taught counseling and worked with counselors and universities in over a dozen countries and his writings have been translated into half a dozen languages. He was a first responder to the 9/11 attack in New York City and to the shootings at Virginia Tech providing psychological first aid to families and colleagues of victims killed. The American Counseling Association awarded him their highest honor, the Gilbert & Kathleen Wrenn Award for a Humanitarian and Caring Person; the Association for Creativity in Counseling named their Inspiration and Motivation Award in his honor; and the ACA has named their Unsung Heroes Award after him.