Supporting Counselors in Their Work: Building Safe and Resilient School Communities

One of the primary effects of the COVID pandemic has been increased mental health vulnerability and disruption; the rate of debilitating anxiety and depression is greater than at any point in recent history.

This finding is particularly true for younger people, and counselors in international school communities have struggled to meet the demands of students and colleagues alike.

We will take a developmental and strength-based perspective as we consider different models of how and why there is so much mental health disruption in schools, and we will work to refine the ways that we implement school based mental health intervention.

CONNECT & ENGAGE

The workshop will provide counselors the opportunity to get to know colleagues living and working in the region. We will talk, share our experiences and reflect on the last two years. We will work to come to terms with what it means to help others when we are depleted, and how we have struggled to do this important work.

LEARN

Counselors will be presented didactic material and will engage in case consultation and seminar discussion. We will talk about how restricted mobility, reduced social contact, high levels of remote learning and social distance relate to mental health disruption. We will talk about commonly occurring mental health problems in international school communities, and ways that counselors can increase their clinical effectiveness.

We will work to understand how and why rates of anxiety and depression have surged, and why understanding how trauma has (and has not) been implicated in this change.

More broadly, we will consider what it means to engage strength-based intervention, including advocating for intentional use of language, facilitating failure, and developing emotional resilience.

REFLECT & APPLY

Counselors will participate in an in-vivo case consultation. We will present cases, as well as consider how the experience of the pandemic has affected the social and emotional health of our students.

We will talk about our own experiences of working with students in the last two years, and we will collectively develop ways of engaging more effective, targeted intervention.

Additionally, we will provide each other professional and personal support, and we will talk about ways of sustaining a professional community beyond the workshop.

None.