Counseling accredited

Clinical and Mental Health program recognized by CACREP

After spending more than a year working to meet the requirements of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling & Related Educational Purposes (CACREP), Liberty University’s Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program received a full eight years of professional accreditation.

The program has been a part of the university since the early 1980s when it originated in the seminary, but this marks the first time it has received professional accreditation. It currently falls under the Center for Counseling and Family Studies.

“Counseling can be done on several levels,” Ron Hawkins, provost and dean of the School of Behavioral Sciences, said. “For instance, we have campus pastors who do counseling around issues connected to the spiritual lives of our students. They refer, for a different type of counseling, students dealing with issues like anxiety disorders, severe depression, manic-depressive disorders, addictions, and panic attacks, anorexia and bulimia.”

According to Hawkins, the people who go through a Clinical and Mental Health Counseling program are prepared to assess pathology and mental health disorders, though they have to cooperate with Doctors and Psychiatrists for medication purposes.

“The program has always been accredited by the Southern Association, just as all of the programs at the university are,” Hawkins said.

“But sometimes in the world of professions, you do professional accreditation. What happens when you do that is you open yourself up to the evaluation of a group of people who look at graduate programs in the field, and they do nothing but accredit those professional programs.”

Hawkins believes the CACREP accreditation is very important in getting professional licenses from the states, because many states have now decided that the standard they are using to give licensure is whether or not students have completed a CACREP-approved program.

According to Hawkins, the accreditation has opened up job opportunities for many students, since the job market often requests that applicants have graduated from a CACREP-approved program.

“So when you do get accreditation, you’ve got the same level accreditation for your counseling program that Virginia Tech and other notable higher-ed institutions have,” Hawkins said. “And so you’re demonstrating that you are at the same level those schools are at, because you’ve had an impartial accrediting agency coming in saying ‘These are universal standards that we apply to all graduate programs and counseling.’”

In order to achieve the accreditation, Liberty faculty worked with CACREP consultants for more than a year to prepare a self-study illustrating how Liberty’s programs satisfied CACREP standards. Hawkins said that some of these standards included having appropriate faculty-student ratios, syllabi being evaluated to make sure classes are at an appropriate level, course requirements, specific course work, internship and practica supervision and quality of the facilities. CACREP gave Liberty a full eight years of accreditation, meaning the school will not have to apply for accreditation again until 2023.

“A lot of the standards are fairly complicated,” Hawkins said. “They don’t have to give you the full eight years of accreditation, but if you do a good job on your self-study and get a really good report from the CACREP team that comes to Liberty to conduct interviews, then you get the full eight years. Our graduates from the MMHC are highly trained people who have gone through practicums and internships with supervision. They leave here with their degree to work in hospitals, private practices and clinical mental health settings.”

Now that the residential programs are accredited, Hawkins said that Liberty faculty are preparing another self-study and beginning the process of seeking accreditation for the online graduate counseling program. Preparation of the self-study and the application process is a high priority for Liberty’s counseling faculty. Looking toward accrediting the online masters program the process is expected to take between one and two years.

JANNEY is the asst. news editor.