About Clinical Counselors

Licensed Clinical Professional Counselors

A Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) is the Maine license given to a (unique) specially trained group of mental health professionals who have completed comprehensive trainings, examinations, and have meet all academic and regulatory requirements of the State of Maine Board of Counseling Professionals. We are not psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers. We are mental health counselors, with our own distinct education and training.

Counselor education is aimed at one thing: To assist the emerging professional to become an outstanding psychotherapist. Counselor training time is not taken up with medication management (psychiatry), the conduct of research and testing (psychology), or advocacy & public policy (social work). These are all important pieces of treatment for an individual, but they are not psychotherapy. Counselor education remains focused on the counseling relationship and psychotherapeutic competence.

In addition, a counseling education imbues the professional with a particular philosophy of helping that can be quite different from that of other professions. While fully trained in contemporary diagnostic and treatment methods, mental health counselors maintain their humanistic roots: counselors tend to take a holistic, non-pathologizing, wellness, and collaborative approach in their work with the people we serve.

Mental health counselors offer a full range of services and have an array of expertise, including:

  • Assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning
  • Clinical Supervision and Consultation
  • Psychotherapy, clinical counseling, psychoeducational counseling, and prevention services
  • A variety of therapeutic, evidenced-based, holistic and person-centered approaches
  • Substance misuse, Family systems, Co-occurring Disorders, and Developmental Disabilities,
  • Individual, group, family, couples, and child treatment interventions
  • Crisis prevention, intervention, and management

Members of all the aforementioned professions can and do offer such services. Mental health counselors, however, are the only profession whose primary purpose is to offer these services.

Like every profession, mental health counseling also has its own standards of practice, code of ethics, journals, and national exams. All of these are developed to support our profession in offering the highest quality mental health care available.

The best way to find out more is to arrange a consultation, often free, with a licensed clinical counselor.