Search

This interpretative phenomenological analysis explored licensed professional counselors' experiences of turning away Medicare beneficiaries because of the current Medicare mental health policy. Researchers used semi-structured interviews to explore the client-level barriers created by federal legislation that determines professional counselors as Medicare-ineligible providers. An in-depth presentation of one superordinate theme, "ineffectual policy," along with the emergent themes "confounding regulations," "programmatic inconsistencies," and "impediment to care," illustrates the proximal barriers Medicare beneficiaries experience when actively seeking out licensed professional counselors for mental health care. Licensed professional counselors' experiences indicate that current Medicare provider regulations interfere with mental health care accessibility and availability for Medicare-insured populations. Implications for advocacy are discussed.

Older adults are at risk for mental health concerns, such as social isolation and suicide. Risk factors to suicide among older adults, such as loneliness and social isolation, may be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Gatekeepers in the community are a significant source of identification and referral of older adults at risk of mental and physical health concerns. In this study, we sought to discover whether natural helpers in the Aging Service Network (ASN), including volunteers and providers (n = 93) obtain and utilize suicide-intervention skills with older adults who receive home-delivered meals (HDM) after being trained in a 14-hour evidenced based training. Paired-sample t-tests yielded significant results at pre- and post-test measures of suicide intervention response skill acquisition, and over 19% of trained participants reported using suicide intervention skills over six months. Implications for future training and research are discussed.

As the number of older adults increases, it is important to understand how attitudes toward aging influence society, the aging process, and the counseling profession. Ageism--defined as social stigma associated with old age or older people--has deleterious effects on older adults' physical health, psychological well-being, and self-perception. In spite of research indicating that the pervasiveness of ageism is growing, there are few studies, whether conceptual or empirical, related to the impact of ageism within the practice of counseling. This article includes an overview of existing literature on the prevalence and impact of ageism, systemic and practitioner-level consequences of ageism, and specific implications for the counseling profession. Discussion of how members of the counseling profession can resist ageism within the contexts of counselor education, gerontological counseling, advocacy, and future research will be addressed.

The authors analyzed data from 5,528 American Counseling Association members to examine advocacy beliefs and behavior regarding Medicare reimbursement and advocacy for counselors. Nearly half (49.3%) of the respondents had participated in one or more forms of Medicare reimbursement advocacy. Advocacy participation differed significantly by professional status.

Resilience has been described as a paradigm for aging that is more inclusive than models that focus on physiological and functional abilities. We evaluated a novel program, Resilient Aging, designed to influence marginalized older adults' perceptions of their resilience, self-efficacy, and wellness. The multiweek group program incorporated an inductive definition of resilience based on group members' lived experiences. Outcomes evaluation for this pilot study included pre/postassessments on resilience, self-efficacy, and six wellness variables. Twenty-nine participants completed the program. Pre/post-assessment indicated a statistically significant multivariate change across the eight outcome variables. Increases in resilience, physical wellness, and emotional wellness, and decreases in social wellness and intellectual wellness accounted for most of the multivariate change. Resilient Aging is a participant-centered and strengths-based program that has potential for enhancing participants' perceptions of resilience and wellness. The program can be administered within community settings to promote resilience and wellness among marginalized older adults.