Licensing Requirements (LPC)

Specific Requirements for becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Louisiana can be found in the General Licensing Requirements for counselor interns on the Licensed Professional Counselors Board of Examiners website.

The applicant must have received a graduate degree with substance in professional mental health counseling from a regionally accredited institution of higher education offering a masters and/or doctoral program in counseling that is approved by the board and has accumulated at least forty-eight (48) graduate semester hours as part of the graduate degree plan containing the eight required areas. The graduate degree shall be defined as: A CACREP accredited counseling program; a counseling program incorporating the word "counseling" or "counselor" in its title; a program incorporating a counseling-related term in its title (e.g. "marriage and family therapy"); or a program incorporating the eight content areas, a counseling practicum and a counseling internship. In addition, the above should not be construed to include degrees in disciplines licensed elsewhere by the State of Louisiana (e.g., social work, psychology) with the exception of counseling psychology, and vocational rehabilitation counseling programs.

The following eight (8) areas are required to have at least one semester course:

• Counseling/theories of personality
• Human growth and development
• Abnormal behavior
• Techniques of counseling
• Group dynamics, processes, and counseling
• Lifestyle and career development
• Appraisal of individuals
• Ethics

An applicant for license must document a minimum of 3,000 hours of post-master's experience in professional mental health counseling under the clinical supervision of a board-approved supervisor, with said supervision occurring over a period of no less than two years and not more than seven years from the original date such supervision was approved.

Louisiana requires 3,000 hours of counseling experience in the following manner:

• A minimum of 1,900 hours (up to 2,900 hours) in direct client contact - individual or group counseling.
• A maximum of 1,000 (indirect) hours in additional client contact, counseling related activities. (i.e., case notes, staffing, case consultation, or testing/assessment of clients) or education at the graduate level in the field of mental health.
• A minimum of 100 hours of face-to-face supervision by a board approved supervisor.

The Louisiana board recommends one hour of supervision for every 20 hours of direct client contact hours obtained.

Acceptable modes for supervision of direct clinical contact are the following:

• Individual Supervision. The supervisory session is conducted by an approved supervisor with one counselor interns present.
• Group Supervision. The supervisory session is conducted by an approved supervisor with no more than ten counselor interns present.
• At least 100 hours of the counselor intern's direct clinical contact with clients must be supervised by an approved supervisor or supervisors.
• At least 50 of these 100 hours must be individual supervision as defined above. The remaining 50 hours of these 100 hours may be either individual supervision or group supervision as defined above (LPCBOARD.ORG, 2010).