The American Mental Health Counselors Association: Reflection on 30 Historic Years

In 2006, the American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA) celebrated its 30th anniversary, presenting an excellent opportunity to reflect on the association's historic beginnings, incredibly rapid growth, developmental milestones, significant successes and its maturation into one of today's premier mental health professional associations. Due in large measure to the tremendous effort on the part of the leadership of AMHCA throughout its 30-year history, mental health counseling is now considered one of the core mental health professions in the United States. The history of AMHCA and mental health counseling as a profession has been previously covered by Weikel (1985), Smith and Robinson (1995), and Weikel and Palmo (1989). However, it seems appropriate that on the occasion of such a momentous anniversary we take time to reflect on the significant role that AMHCA has played in the development of mental health counseling as an independent mental health profession and its recognition as a core mental health profession along with psychiatry, psychology, social work, and marriage and family therapy. * Beginnings Smith and Robinson (1995) reported that in the 1970s, mental health counselors had no clear identity as a profession and no professional organization to champion their efforts to be recognized as a legitimate distinct profession within the mental health field. The authors indicated that by the mid-1970s, it became clear that there were a large number of individuals who (a) were educationally prepared at either the master's or doctoral level; (b) worked in community agencies, community mental health, or private practice settings; (c) were delivering a wide variety of services very similar to the more established mental health care provider groups of psychiatry, psychology, and social work; and (d) felt they had no professional home by virtue of their uniqueness (p. 159). It was in this climate that AMHCA was born in May 1976 when Jim Messina and Nancy Spisso of the Escambia County Mental Health Center took action on the basis of letters written to the American Personnel and Guidance Association's (APGA) Guidepost by Ed Anderson and his Wisconsin colleagues and earlier by Gary Seiler of the University of Florida. The correspondence addressed the lack of representation and recognition for non-school counselors within APGA. Messina and Spisso joined with Gary Seiler and Jim Hiett, also in Florida, in an attempt to establish a new division within APGA. Messina contacted then-APGA President Thelma Daley for information on what needed to be done to establish a new division (Weikel, 1985, 1994). This core group consisting of mental health professionals from the University of Florida and other mental health practitioners from Wisconsin, a group that included Ed Anderson, formed the American Mental Health Counselors Association. The group quickly expanded to 50 members and they unsuccessfully petitioned the APGA for admittance as a new division in July 1976. Because a moratorium on the establishment of new divisions had been passed by the APGA Board that same month, the AMHCA proposal was not acted upon by APGA and the group established themselves as an independent organization in November 1976. The new organization achieved fairly rapid success because of the early leadership's recognition of the critical need for establishing an identity for the counseling professionals working in various community mental health settings (Weikel & Palmo, 1989). By the time of its first annual conference, which was held concurrently with the APGA convention in Dallas in March 1977, the membership had grown from the original 50 members to almost 500. A Board of Directors for AMHCA was elected and Spisso became president, Messina was president-elect, Rebecca Stall was secretary, David Rouse-Eastin was treasurer, and Don Didier became member-at-large. The AMHCA meeting in Dallas was attended by the then-APGA President-Elect Norm Gysbers; by the end of the APGA convention, the moratorium on new divisions had been lifted. …