Strengthening Rehabilitation Professional Identities: Including Grief Education as a Psychosocial Aspect of Disability

The primary objective of this paper is to call attention to rehabilitation counseling educators and leaders to include grief support as part of the rehabilitation counseling training curriculum. Disability and chronic illness have long been associated with loss, death anxiety, and chronic sorrow. The prevailing model of psychosocial adaptation to chronic illness and disability emanated from grief theories and has been well conceptualized and applied in both understanding disability experiences and providing effective services. However, rehabilitation counselors have expressed a lack of competency and confidence in understanding grief as a psychosocial concept and providing grief support for people with chronic illness and disabilities. Too often, pervasive understanding of grief and loss has been associated with pathology and prescriptive notions, which have been criticized by clinicians and scholars in bereavement research and practice. To address this concern, this paper proposes including grief support education in rehabilitation counselor training curricula. In addition, several suggestions are made for program design and implementation within the context of CACREP curricula requirements.