Graduate students in the Addictions Counseling Certificate program learn a wide variety of theories of addiction and approaches to care.
The colored eyeglasses worn by students (and Professor Cynthia Osborn, pictured above) symbolize the different perspectives of addiction covered in the course, including addiction as a disease, addiction as a learned or maladaptive set of behaviors, addiction as a sociocultural construct, and addiction as a public health concern.
In essence, the different colored frames represent the "lenses" through which practitioners view addictive behaviors. Students learn how these perspectives shape the type of care counselors and other practitioners provide to clients and prospective clients.
"The coursework required for the Addictions Counseling Certificate has been incredibly helpful for me as a graduate student due to the breadth and depth with which we are taught to understand our future clients and their situations," said Erin Wehrenberg, a graduate student from Brecksville, Ohio, (pictured back row, middle). "By being presented with a comprehensive, holistic understanding of addiction, we are then able to use our clinical discernment in a way that best helps and supports our clients for their own individual treatment. I am grateful Kent offers this certificate."
"How we view people and their circumstances and conditions greatly influences our responses to them," said Osborn, who teaches in the Counselor Education and Supervision program. "This includes welcoming or inadvertently discounting them."
In addition, students gain further understanding of the harmful consequences to clients of stigmatizing views of addiction still widely held by the public, such as addiction as an immoral, voluntary, and self-inflicted set of behaviors.
"Each perspective of addiction recommended to students is valid," said Osborn, who also serves as Coordinator of the Addictions Counseling Certificate Program. "No one theory or perspective is superior or somehow correct. Each theory has an explanatory function. The theory selected by a counselor in working with clients is also determined by the client's needs, preferences, and culture – as well as their own understanding of addiction. Becoming familiar with a range of perspectives on addiction is needed for counselors to enhance their empathy for persons who struggle with substance use disorders so that individualized plans of care can be devised."