The Big Picture of Advocacy: Counselor, Heal Society and Thyself.

This article explores how counselors can be a part of the growing movement for social justice advocacy in counseling. Lately, counselors have come to realize how important counseling skills, interventions, insights, and the counseling relationship are in helping more community members as well as systems of mental health services and professional organizations (e.g., American Counseling Association, American Psychological Association) become social justice advocates and helping more social justice advocates become effective builders of societies (Toporek, Gerstein, Fouad, Roysircar, & Israel, 2006). This article begins with a big-picture analysis of social justice advocacy. Counselors need a seasoned or mature critical consciousness of the big picture so that they understand why they are engaged in, and give voice to, social justice advocacy. The idea is that a single issue is not sufficient and that effective counselor-advocates need to develop an integrated sense of the underlying social system, political economy, and the dynamics of social action history and strategy. To Be or Not to Be Socially Adjusted Martin Luther King Jr. Challenges Diagnosis and Treatment Counselors who offer individual mental health services treat clients diagnosed with adjustment disorder, which is defined as the development of clinically significant emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an identifiable psychosocial stressor or stressors (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Forty years ago, however, in an Invited Distinguished Address at the 1967 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the hindering notion that the goal of therapy is to help clients become "well-adjusted" to the social world around them. As King put it, You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word "maladjusted." This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be eradicated. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But on the other hand, I am sure that we all recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted.... We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. ("King's Challenge to the Nation's Social Scientists," 1999, pp. 9-10) Becoming Creatively Maladjusted King argued that it is actually pathological for a person to become well-adjusted to a world of injustice, violence, war, and exploitation. He argued that for counselors to make a meaningful contribution to people's mental health, they would have to find ways to help ordinary citizens develop their capacity for what King called "creative maladjustment nonconformity" (as cited in Carson, 1995, p. 319). King's fundamental argument was that counselor-advocates who are actively engaged in healing society are creatively maladjusted. I call on all counselors to give voice to King's argument that it is the advocate half of the counselor-advocate that puts the creative into what Martin Luther King Jr. called creative maladjustment nonconformity. Organizational Obstacles to Counselor Social Justice Advocacy Societal Forces Behind Mental Illness Not everyone in academic departments or in mental health services supports helping ordinary people; community groups; as well as government, city, or private organizations become citizen advocates who work together for positive social and environmental changes. …