Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions

The current practice of counseling, psychotherapy, and most helping professions often relies on clinical wisdom with little evidence of what actually works. Clinical wisdom is often a justification for beliefs and values that bond people together as professionals but often fails to serve clients since many of those beliefs and values may be comforting, but they may also be inherently incorrect.

Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice covers the use of research and critical thinking to assist helping professionals make the most effective choices in treating clients with social and emotional problems. The use of evidence-based practice (EBP) comes at a time when managed care and concerns over health care costs coincide with growing concerns that psychotherapy, case management, and counseling may not be sufficiently effective ways of helping people in social and emotional difficulty.

Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions provides an easy-to-read, inclusive approach covering EBP with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and terrorism, bereavement, substance abuse, mental illness, and problems experienced by older adults, among others. This text critically reviews the literature on self-help groups, religious involvement, and spirituality. It also includes sources to find best evidence, a simple overview of research concepts, a chapter on critical thinking, and numerous relevant case studies showing the application of EBP.

Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions is ideally suited for undergraduate and graduate students in social work, psychology, counseling, criminal justice, psychiatric nursing, and psychiatry. This book should also prove beneficial to all practitioners and specialists in the helping professions.

Dr. Morley D. Glicken is the former Dean of the Worden School of Social Service in San Antonio; the founding director of the Master of Social Work Department at California State University, San Bernardino; the past Director of the Master of Social Work Program at the University of Alabama; and the former Executive Director of Jewish Family Service of Greater Tucson. He has also held faculty positions in social work at the University of Kansas and Arizona State University. He currently teaches in the Department of Social Work at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Dr. Glicken received his BA degree in social work with a minor in psychology from the University of North Dakota and holds an Master of Social Work degree from the University of Washington and the Master of Public Administration and Doctor of Social Work degrees from the University of Utah. He is a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honorary Fraternity. In 2010, Praeger Press published his books on workaholism and retirement and another on mature love. In 2009, Praeger Press published his book A Simple Guide to Retirement (with Brian Haas). Elsevier, Inc. published his books Evidence-Based Practice with Troubled Children and Adolescents: A Psychosocial Perspective and, Evidence Based Counseling and Psychotherapy with an Aging Population, also in 2009. In 2008 he published A Guide to Writing for Human Service Professionals for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. In 2006 he published Life Lessons from Resilient People, published by Sage Publications. He published Working with Troubled Men: A Practitioner’s Guide for Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers in 2005 and Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice in 2004 for Sage Publications. In 2003 he published Violent Young Children, and Understanding and Using the Strengths Perspective for Allyn and Bacon/Longman Publishers. Dr. Glicken published two books for Allyn and Bacon/Longman Publishers in 2002: The Role of the Helping Professions in the Treatment of Victims and Perpetrators of Crime (with Dale Sechrest) and, A Simple Guide to Social Research. Dr Glicken has published over 50 articles in professional journals and has written extensively on personnel issues for Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. He has held clinical social work licenses in Alabama and Kansas and is a member of the Academy of Certified Social Workers. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Social Work at California State University, San Bernardino and Executive Director of the Institute for Personal Growth: A Research, Treatment, and Training Institute in Prescott, Arizona offering consulting services in counseling, research, and management. More information about Dr. Glicken may be obtained on his website: www.morleyglicken.com. A listing of all of his books may be found on Amazon.com at: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/v/1973805540 and he can be contacted by email at: mglicken@msn.com.