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Founded in 1985, The Counseling Team operates independently under our family of companies that includes First Responder Wellness and Shift Wellness. Together, we are one of the only organizations that offers a full suite of proactive and reactive wellness solutions exclusively for public safety professionals and first responders.
The Counseling Team International (TCTI) was founded by Dr. Nancy Bohl-Penrod in San Bernardino, California.
The training division was expanded at TCTI to include culturally competent instructors and course certifications for ICISF, LEWA, POST, BRN, and ICEMA.
The addition of TCTI Employee Support Services (ESS) provides short term counseling and support resources for public safety employees, spouses, and tax eligible dependents.
Peer Support Programs were introduced by TCTI that provide culturally competent training and peer support resources.
TCTI expanded their services to include crisis and hostage negotiation and line of duty death response.
Dr. Stephen Odom founded a treatment center that would eventually become First Responder Wellness to exclusively treat public safety professionals.
First Responder Wellness and The Counseling Team International began collaboration.
Shift Wellness was founded and offers retreats for trauma, resilience, and wellness designed for leaders, peer support teams, individuals, departments, and spouses.
First Responder Wellness and The Counseling Team began a strategic partnership, and fully merged into our family of companies in February 2022.
TCTI supports over 150 full service and 300 fee for service contracts. We average 20,000+ counseling sessions, 420+ crisis debriefs, and 3,100+ pre-employment psych tests each year.
Expansion of services now include a Proactive Approach to Wellness, and development of new and relevant training and retreats to support the health and wellness of the agencies we serve.
Today, The Counseling Team International, First Responder Wellness and Shift Wellness operate independently under FR Health.
We work together to ensure the trust of our clients, community, and agency partners through transparency, privacy, and performance.
Learn more about job opportunities with our team that has a shared purpose to support public safety departments and organizations.
Learn how to apply to our network of mental health professionals who provide the best possible environment for the departments we serve.
The Counseling Team
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
We are excited to share our new design with improved navigation so you can find the resources you need. We have added drop-down menus for easy page selections, easy to find contact numbers when you need to call, and have added a new wellness library.
