Professional counselors who provided services to those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita completed the K6+ (screen for severe mental illness), the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory, and the Professional Quality of Life Scale. Results indicated that participants who survived the hurricanes had higher levels of posttraumatic growth than…

In 1994, The Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health (MI-AIMH) began the development of a credentialing process to define the skills and experiences needed by professionals in the infant mental health field. This article describes MI-AIMH's process to identify competencies for best practices and to establish a comprehensive system for the…

Throughout the country and especially in Texas, local communities opened their arms to hurricane Katrina evacuees. Like the federal government, emergency health and mental health entities were unprepared for the massive numbers of people needing assistance. Mental health professionals, though armed with a wealth of crisis intervention information,…

In this article, the author relates the lessons she learned from Hurricane Katrina. During the first few days after the hurricane, it took 2,500 volunteers per hour around the clock to do what needed to be done. That included medical volunteers; crisis counselors and mental health professionals; and volunteers to distribute water and snacks, serve…

A statewide evaluation of the mental health technologies programs of Texas' community colleges was conducted to determine the extent to which the programs use the principles of competency-based instruction (CBI) and performance standards and to establish whether competencies being taught have been evaluated in the workplace. The following were…