7.1 Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives
Ethical Standards for Human Services Professionals
STANDARD 4: When a human service professional suspects a client’s behavior may endanger themselves or others, they must take appropriate and professional actions to ensure safety, which may include consulting, seeking supervision, or, in accordance with state and federal laws, breaching confidentiality (NOHS, 2024).
We closed Chapter 6 with discussions about healthcare settings, careers, and issues. Mental health is part of overall health, but we have devoted a separate chapter to it because of its prominence in society today.
Standard 27 reminds us that although human services professionals have a broad base of knowledge, we must also be aware that there are specialized professionals to meet specific needs. Mental health is an area where specialized professionals such as licensed counselors, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists are often the appropriate person for a client to see. It’s important to make these referrals and not try to address problems that we may not be qualified to treat.
Learning Objectives
- Define mental health, mental wellness, mental disorders
- Explain in brief the history of mental health treatment in the United States.
- Recognize the most common mental health disorders and bias considerations around diagnosis.
- Recognize the special needs of particular populations in mental health treatment.
- Explain various roles of human services workers in the mental health fields.
- Overview of self-care and community care for practitioners.
Key Terms
Key terms are important vocabulary for understanding the content of the chapters. They will be bolded and defined via an in-text glossary the first time that they appear in the chapter. Key terms for this chapter are:
- Art or music therapist: specialized therapists who can assist in the healing process through the use of art, music, dance, and other means of creative expression and relaxation
- Community mental health center (CMHC): a small institution dedicated to serving people who have mental health struggles in contrast to large institutional hospitals
- Counselor: a person engages in assessment, diagnosis, and provision of therapy services.
- Employee assistance program (EAP): a benefit provided by some employers that allows workers to access quick, temporary mental health support
- Marriage and family therapist: a specialized area of counseling and therapy in family and relationship dynamics that helps people to resolve emotional and behavioral concerns impacting family relationships
- Mental disorder: A syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2022)
- Mental health: a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capacity to establish constructive relationships and cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life (American Psychological Association, 2018, para. 1)
- Mental illness: a condition that impacts a person’s thinking, feeling, or mood [that] may affect their ability to relate to others and function on a daily basis (NAMI, n.d.a, para. 1)
- Play therapy: a specialized method for working with younger children that helps children to communicate and open up with a therapist about things they might otherwise struggle to put into words
- Psychiatric nurse: nurses who perform much the same functions as counselors, therapists, or clinical social workers, with additional specific training in the medical field and the ability prescribe medication in some states
- Psychiatrist: a medical doctor with a specialty in mental health
- Psychologist: conduct therapy, perform psychological testing, assess, and diagnose clients
- Mental wellness: an internal resource that helps us think, feel, connect, and function; it is an active process that helps us to build resilience, grow, and flourish (Global Wellness Institute, 2020, para. 1)
- Self-care: is defined as needs for overall well-being. It helps manage stress, reduce ailments, and foster positive emotions for a healthier life. Self-care can be viewed in nine domains: environment, physical, social, emotional, spiritual, personal/relationships, professional, financial, and community.
- Community-care: is defined as the care that BIPOC and QTBIPOC communities emphasize the interconnectedness of individual and community well-being, fostering connections, recognizing systemic inequities, and creating new structures to address these issues. It aims to promote a more equitable future through mutual support, addressing social determinants of health and resource gaps. Community care seeks to create new structures and increase access to valuable resources through mutual support and aid provided by individuals and the broader community.
- Womxn: an inclusive term that began to be used in the 1970s to be inclusive of transgender women and nonbinary people’s experiences.
Licenses and Attributions
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives” by Elizabeth B. Pearce is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.
a professional field focused on helping people solve their problems.
action to preserve and improve one’s own physical and mental health.