What is a Lay Counselor?
Where do Lay Counselors Work?
Lay counselors can work in any health or social care organization, such as primary care or hospital systems. Lay counselors can also work in schools, universities or any other human service setting.
Why Lay Counselor Training?
Mental Health
We are in a mental health crisis in this country, with children, adolescents and adults with high levels of need
Need
We do not have enough licensed mental health therapists to meet the current need
Support
There is good evidence that Lay Counselors can provide comparable services to licensed therapists
What if your staff could get 50 hours of deep,
transformational learning to be a lay counselor?
When should your organization use a Lay Counselor?
If your organization has long wait lists for patients, clients or students to see behavioral health clinicians...
If your patients, clients or students experience long wait times before a first BH appointment…
If you’ve had continuous open BH clinician positions that you can’t fill…
If you can’t find bilingual or bicultural BH clinicians….
benefits of Having Lay Counselors for your healthcare organization
Provide Timely Care
Get your patients, clients, or students the care they need in a safe and timely manner
Enrich Your Team
Enrich and elevate your most dedicated, skillful employees
Additional Counselling Skills
Spread core behavioral health counselling skills throughout your organization
Our Course Modules:
By signing up to our EM Consulting Lay Counselor academy your staff will learn the following:
- CBT and Behavioral Activation
- Motivational Interviewing
- Person-Centered Approaches
- Strength-focused supporting counseling
- Mindfulness and self-compassion practices
- Anti-racist counseling
- Awareness of biases and how to mitigate
- Developing and maintaining the Therapeutic Alliance
- Staying in unconditional positive regard
- Anxiety and how to help
- Depression and how to help
- Substance use and how to help
- Relationship problems and how to help
- Trauma and how to help
- Boundaries and Ethics
- Optimizing clinical supervision
- Effective use of lived experience
- Initiation and termination of course of counseling
- Mandated reporting
- Suicide risk assessment an intervention