California Mental Health Continuing Education and License Information

california mental health professionals continuing education and license renewals
California mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and social workers have a license renewal every two years with a date of license issue deadline. Thirty-six (36) hours of continuing education are required for license renewal. There are no limits on home study if courses are done entirely online (course and test), and NBCC, APA, or ASWB approved. Six hours of laws and ethics are required at each renewal.

First Renewal Only: MFT and SW- 7 hrs in detection and treatment of alcohol and other chemical substance dependency, and 7 hrs HIV

Professional Development Resources is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education for psychologists; the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC ACEP #5590); the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB Provider #1046, ACE Program); the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA Provider #3159); the Commission on Dietetic Registration (CDR Provider #PR001); and the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (#PCE1625).

Continuing Education Courses for Mental Health Professionals:

Helping Your Young Client Persevere in the Face of Learning Differences is a 3-hour online video CE course. Clinicians and teachers working with students struggling at grade level are committed to raising their students’ achievement potential by creating opportunities to learn. In order to accomplish this, they need to learn new techniques that can help encourage discouraged students – particularly those who have different ways of learning – by supporting and motivating them without enabling self-defeating habits. This course will provide strategies and techniques for helping students minimize the patterns of “learned helplessness” they have adopted, appreciate and maximize their strengths, develop a growth mindset, value effort and persistence over success, view mistakes as opportunities to learn, and develop a love of learning that will help them take personal responsibility for their school work. The course video is split into 3 parts for your convenience.

The Use of Humor in Therapy is a 2-hour online CE course. Should therapists and counselors use humor as a therapeutic technique? If so, should they be formally trained in those procedures before their implementation? This course will review the risks and benefits of using humor in therapy and the relevant historical controversies of this proposal. The paucity of rigorous empirical research on the effectiveness of this form of clinical intervention is exceeded only by the absence of any training for those practitioners interested in applying humor techniques. In this course a representative sample of its many advocates’ recommendations to incorporate humor in the practice of psychological therapies is reviewed. Therapeutic humor is defined, the role of therapists’ personal qualities is discussed, and possible reasons for the profession’s past resistance to promoting humor in therapy are described. Research perspectives for the evaluation of humor training are presented with illustrative examples of important empirical questions still needing to be answered.

Living a Better Life with Chronic Pain: Eliminating Self-Defeating Behaviors is a 5-hour online CE course. Certainly no one would choose a pain-filled body over a healthy, pain-free body. Yet every day, people unwittingly choose actions and attitudes that contribute to pain or lead to other less-than-desirable consequences on their health, relationships or ability to function. These actions and attitudes are what are called self-defeating behaviors (SDBs) and they keep us from living life to the fullest—if we let them. This course is a self-instructional module that “walks” readers through the process of replacing their self-defeating chronic pain issues with healthy, positive, and productive life-style behaviors. It progresses from an analysis of the emotional aspects of living with chronic pain to specific strategies for dealing more productively with it. Through 16 guided exercises, readers will learn how to identify their self-defeating behaviors (SDBs), analyze and understand them, and then replace them with life-giving actions that lead to permanent behavioral change.

Data obtained from the California Board of Behavioral Sciences on April 13, 2015.