Carew Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

John Carew has been a long-term advocate for our profession from its beginning in Massachusetts. He served as a voice for mental health counselors in the development of the Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) regulations and the creation of the first licensing board in Massachusetts. He has been involved with Counselor Educator programs, and an active member of MARIACES, serving on many joint MARIACES/MaMHCA committees to advocate for counseling graduate students and LMHCs and with various Massachusetts state departments as well as on an international level (through IRTAC).

John is a licensed psychologist and led the way for many other mental health counseling faculty members with other degrees and licenses by being the first to also become an LMHC.  As a long-time faculty member at Cambridge College, John has been a continuous, strong positive influence on new mental health counseling professionals as they grow in the field.  

John commented, "Receiving this award has led me to reflect on all the relationships that the award represents, and how fortunate I was to often be in the right place at the right time.  From the start, my core value was to help professionalize the LMHC role, so professional counselors in Massachusetts would no longer be exploited, due to a lack of regulatory /  legal status. I'm happy to see that, over the years, through the work of many, the LMHC profession has become an empowered player in Massachusetts mental health care.  I'm proud to be associated with MaMHCA, an organization which stands out for its contributions to the profession on a national scale, as well as in our home state."