Therapists, Counselors, and Social Workers are different types of mental health professionals. While they often do similar work, these are three distinctly different licenses in the state of Ohio. Training for these specialties are often different, so they have different ways of treating clients.
Marriage and Family Therapists, for instance, are trained to look at a holistic picture of a client’s world instead of just the symptoms or the problem. This ability to see the big picture often leads to novel approaches to change.
Counselors are often trained to look at the individual and their symptoms as a starting point, and change most often takes place at the level of the individual.
Social Workers look at problems through a societal lens. Social workers may see the solution to a problem more as a function of dealing with society then with an issue with an individual client.