40

COUNSELING WITH DEAF PEOPLE

Chicago alone there were many times the number of multiply handicapped deaf persons than could be served in the Hot Springs Rehabilitation Center. Yet, these young adults did not know of the Center's services nor did their families, their teachers, their ministers, or even their D.V.R. counselors. This Center, ostensibly serving the entire nation, could be filled by referrals from one city. At the other end of the continuum were many bright deaf youths capable of college, junior college, or technical education who were oblivious to many outstanding programs of the permanent facilities like Gallaudet College and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

The problem is one of communication. The establishment of a good program is but the first step in the delivery of services (Hurwitz, 1970). Over the last ten years giant strides have been made in this initial step of starting facilities. The task of informing and counseling those needing the services has only begun. The eventual solution to this problem is a national, continually up-dated registry of deaf persons. Since at this time such a registry is not within the foreseeable future, other steps must be taken.

First, an annual listing of all postsecondary programs serving deaf clients should be sent to every counselor working with deaf clients, many general counselors, speech and hearing centers, and selected schools. This should list what kind of training is offered and procedures for enrollment. Hearing and Speech News published an initial effort in this direction, which, unfortunately, is only a token of what is needed and is not planned as an annual feature (Vernon, 1970a).

The gap between need of and demand for rehabilitation is an important reason for the low achievement of the deaf population and the increasing presence of deaf persons unnecessarily forced to accept welfare for lack of any known alternative. While its remediation may lack the drama and appeal of other steps, the communication gap is a correctable counseling problem and should be dealt with immediately.

Social Change and Counseling

Currently, we see increasing unemployment among deaf youth and predictions of an even worse problem in years to come (Sessions, 1966; Vernon, 1970b). With automation eliminating the jobs in which deaf people have historically been employed, and with present low educational levels precluding many available types of employment, there is tremendous need for increased counseling services of the highest caliber. If 70 percent of deaf people are to avoid the unemployment that John Sessions, AFLCIO labor authority, predicts (1966), and if the remaining 30 percent are not to wind up in the dead-end jobs he forecasts for them, then current and

CURRENT STATUS OF COUNSELING WITH DEAF PEOPLE

41

future needs must be met with immediate in-depth, long-term programs and planning. The complexity and rapid change of contemporary society requires that the deaf person be provided more than anachronistic, ineffective education followed by improving yet inadequate rehabilitation and counseling.

Black Deaf People

Currently, the black deaf population remains an essentially unidentified, unserved group (Schein, 1968). The problems of blackness and deafness in combination are not additive, but multiplicative. Case findings with these persons is essential. For example, the Chicago Mental Health Project was located in the heart of Chicago's huge South Side black ghetto, where needs for mental health services were overwhelming. Yet, the lack of black professional staff, the lack of organization of the black deaf community, and poor case finding resulted in very little demand for service. The problem is national and current efforts at its remediation minimal.

Psychodiagnostics

Counseling is often facilitated by psychodiagnostic data. Currently, there are no adequate interest tests, in-depth personality measures, or psychometric instruments that are usable with most deaf clients. The verbal content of the tests coupled with the verbal limitations of many deaf persons make the results of such measures invalid.

Current Status of Training

The number of professionally prepared counselors qualified to serve deaf clients of all ages is grossly short of both the need and the demand. Staffing the graduate programs required to fill this gap is difficult with present manpower resources. Currently, only New York University and the University of Arizona are producing significant numbers of fully trained professional counselors. The Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois offered programs, but they lacked specialists in deafness and operate marginally. Until such specialists and specialized courses are provided, student interest in the field of counseling with the deaf is minimal. The orientation program at the University of Tennessee has contributed greatly, but it is of only three months duration, precluding in-depth preparation. It serves to familiarize people with deafness, but many of its students lack basic counseling training. Oregon has an orientation program similar to Tennessee's, but shorter.

42

COUNSELING WITH DEAF PEOPLE

Obviously, graduate preparation in counseling with deaf persons is primarily a void. Demands for such programs and for their graduates is both determined by and determines the services available to deaf people. Personal counseling, school counseling, parent counseling, and college counseling are fields of almost total undersupply, yet in these areas there are absolutely no adequate graduate-level programs preparing people in deafness or orienting existing professionals. This unmet need is crucial.

A similar vacuum exists in the supply of professionals to serve the emotionally disturbed and the mentally ill, the pastoral counseling field, and marriage and family counseling areas. In some of these disciplines there are scattered qualified professionals available, but no solid training program to meet needs.

Training grants and fellowship programs similar to those provided by Public Law 565 are now needed to meet the vast needs in counseling with deaf persons. The model provided by P.L. 565 would require little or no change to be broadened to underwrite counseling training. Similar programs have almost overcome what had seemed like an insurmountable under supply of teachers of deaf children. Such laws can perform the same service to the field of counseling if passed by Congress.

CHAPTER III

Principles of Counseling with Deaf People

C. H. PATTERSON LARRY G. STEWART

This chapter will do two things: first, it will present the nature and essential principles of counseling, and, second, it will consider the implementation of these principles in counseling persons who are deaf. The nature and principles of counseling with deaf people are no different than those which characterize counseling with other people. It is the application or implementation of these principles that will differ in some respects with deaf clients.

THE NATURE OF COUNSELING

It is difficult if not impossible to define counseling adequately in a brief statement. There are almost as many definitions as there are authors of texts in counseling. While there are similarities and overlappings in definitions, some include aspects that others omit. Rather than attempting at this point to give a simple, brief definition, or to summarize or combine definitions found in the literature, we shall describe the nature of counseling and the necessary conditions or essential principles of counseling.

What Counseling Is Not

It is sometimes useful to approach a definition by exclusion, designating what a thing or concept is not. This approach is particularly appropriate in the case of counseling, in view of the many misconceptions of what counseling is. Let us consider some things that are often considered to be counseling, but that are not counseling as a professional activity.

43

79-885 72 pt. 2 23

44

COUNSELING WITH DEAF PEOPLE

First of all, counseling is not the giving of information, though information may sometimes be given in counseling. Nor is the giving of advice, suggestions, and recommendations counseling. This is perhaps the lay concept of counseling and is the activity of people in the professions of law, medicine, and engineering that is often labeled counseling. But professional advice is not counseling, nor is a professional consultation a counseling relationship. The giving of advice should be labeled and recognized as such and not camouflaged as counseling.

Counseling is not influencing attitudes, beliefs, or behavoir by means of persuading, leading, or convincing, no matter how indirectly, subtly, or painlessly. It is not the process of getting someone to think or behave in ways that we want him to think or behave, or in ways we think best for him. Let us recognize the process of persuasion for what it is and not mistake it for counseling. Counseling is not brainwashing.

Nor is counseling the influencing of behavior by admonishing, warning, threatening, or coercing without the use of physical force. Discipline is not counseling.

Counseling is not the selection and assignment of individuals for various jobs or activities. Personnel work is not counseling, even though the same tests may be used in both.

Finally, interviewing is not synonymous with counseling. Interviewing is involved in the kinds of relationships listed above, as well as in other noncounseling situations. The intake interview to gather information about an applicant or client, or to orient him may be a prelude to counseling but it is not counseling.

It may seem to be very elementary to point out these things, but all of these are being done under the name of counseling. Counseling, in many if not most agencies concerned with rehabilitation, is seen as a way of doing something to a client, to get him to do what he should do, or what we think he should do, or what we think is good for him. Counseling is seen as a group of techniques utilized as devices to manipulate or influence the client toward the acceptance of the counselor's goals or objectives. Thus we hear such phrases as counseling the client into, or out of, a vocational field or objective, or counseling a client to accept this or that goal or objective, or toward this or that choice or decision. This kind of activity is not counseling, and it is a misuse of the term to call it such. Counseling is not something you do to, or practice upon, a client.