FAU’s College of Education has received a $1.2 million grant from the Children’s Services Council of Palm Beach County to launch OWLS-FLY, an acronym for Opportunity, Wellness, Leadership & Strength with Families Leading Youth. The three-year program will deliver free counseling and family support services to children ages 6 to 17 and their families, with half of its capacity deliberately reserved for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their siblings and their caregivers. The funding comes through the Council’s fiscal 2026 Request for Proposals for Youth Development, which prioritized youth mental health as a central focus area.

The program’s architecture reflects a growing consensus in clinical psychology and counselor education: child mental health cannot be treated in isolation from family systems. OWLS-FLY will operate through a university-based counseling clinic that combines direct service delivery with specialized graduate-level training and formal partnerships with community organizations. Families will have access to individual counseling for youth, family therapy sessions, parent and co-parenting groups, and other supportive services, all available either in person or through telehealth platforms. Telehealth delivery is particularly significant for families in designated mental health professional shortage areas, where transportation and provider scarcity often make consistent attendance difficult.

Services will be delivered by advanced graduate counseling students pursuing education specialist degrees, along with postdoctoral scholars, all working under close supervision from licensed faculty and clinicians. This supervised-training model serves a dual purpose. Families receive care at no cost, while the next generation of counselors accumulates hundreds of supervised clinical hours working with populations they might otherwise rarely encounter during standard training. The model mirrors successful clinic-based training programs at universities nationwide, where research consistently shows that structured supervision produces competent clinicians while expanding community access to care.

Eligibility priorities reveal the program’s public health logic. OWLS-FLY will prioritize low-income families, households located in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas, children with significant exposure to adverse childhood experiences, autistic youth and other children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their siblings, and families referred through community partner organizations. Adverse childhood experiences, which include exposure to violence, household instability and neglect, are well-documented risk factors for long-term mental and physical health outcomes, making early intervention a measurable investment rather than a charitable gesture.

Kelly Emelianchik-Key, Ph.D., a professor in FAU’s Department of Counselor Education and the initiative’s principal investigator, said the grant creates an opportunity to make a meaningful difference for families who too often face barriers to mental health care. She explained that bringing accessible, family-centered services together with specialized counselor training can support children’s emotional well-being, strengthen families and ensure more families encounter professionals who understand their unique needs. Her oversight will span program administration, curriculum design and clinical quality assurance across the three-year funding period.

Alexander M. Fields, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Counselor Education and co-principal investigator, emphasized the clinical rationale behind the program’s family-systems orientation. He noted that children with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families can encounter mental health challenges requiring more specialized support than traditional services typically provide. Fields stressed that a child’s well-being is connected to the entire family unit, and that systematically evaluating outcomes for youth with disabilities will help identify what works, strengthen the services provided and inform future approaches to disability-informed mental health care. His research leadership signals that OWLS-FLY is designed not just as a service program but as an evidence-generating one.

Beyond direct clinical services, OWLS-FLY establishes a structured training pathway intended to address the workforce shortage at its root. Each year, eight to twelve advanced graduate counseling students will complete a specialized four-course training sequence and accumulate supervised clinical experience with diverse youth populations. The curriculum is designed to build both theoretical knowledge and practical skills for addressing the emotional, behavioral and family needs of children with and without disabilities. Over three years, this means roughly two dozen to three dozen counselors entering the field with disability-informed training they would be unlikely to receive in conventional graduate programs, where disability-specific coursework is often limited to a single elective.

The initiative’s stated goals extend across multiple levels of impact: improving emotional well-being among children and teens, reducing caregiver stress, strengthening family relationships and expanding access to specialized mental healthcare throughout Palm Beach County. Postdoctoral researchers Christina Ladd, Ph.D., and Rotem Moshe, Ph.D., will support implementation through clinical instruction and supervision, clinic operations, client data management and assessment of program outcomes, ensuring the evaluation component remains rigorous and continuous rather than retrospective.

Charles Dukes, Ed.D., Ph.D., dean of FAU’s College of Education, framed the grant as an example of how a university can integrate education, research and community engagement to address a pressing public need. In his view, expanding access to mental health services while preparing highly trained counselors to serve children and families with diverse needs advances the college’s dual commitment to developing skilled professionals and building stronger communities. If OWLS-FLY meets its objectives, the model could offer a replicable template for other counties confronting the same twin crises: a shortage of disability-competent mental health providers and families left waiting for care that should never have been this hard to find.

Subject of Research: A university-based family-centered youth mental health services and counselor training program in Palm Beach County

Article Title: FAU receives $1.2 grant to expand youth mental health services

Article References: FAU receives $1.2 grant to expand youth mental health services. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: youth mental health, intellectual and developmental disabilities, Florida Atlantic University, counselor training, Palm Beach County, family therapy, telehealth, adverse childhood experiences, Children's Services Council, mental health workforce shortage, autism, community mental health

The research, conducted by Moon Hee Yu and Song Yi Lee of the Department of Counseling and Coaching at Dongguk University in Seoul, set out to capture the subjective viewpoints of practicing counselors rather than to measure their knowledge or test their attitudes on a scale. The team turned to Q methodology, a research technique developed in the 1930s by physicist and psychologist William Stephenson that is specifically designed to map patterns of subjectivity. Unlike a conventional survey, which asks everyone the same fixed questions, Q methodology asks participants to rank-order a set of statements according to how much they agree with them, from their own standpoint. The resulting rankings are then compared statistically to reveal clusters of people who share a coherent point of view.

In this study, thirty practicing counselors in South Korea sorted forty statements concerning the integration of neuroscience into counseling. The statements covered a wide terrain: the professional relevance of neuroscience, its practical applicability in the therapy room, the training it would require, and its implications for the identity of the counseling profession itself. Participants physically arranged the statements in a quasi-normal distribution, forcing them to make relative judgments rather than simply endorsing everything they liked. The researchers then applied principal component analysis with varimax rotation, a statistical procedure that identifies the main dimensions along which the sortings vary, using the KADE desktop application built for Q methodological work.

The analysis converged on four distinct viewpoints, and the labels the researchers gave them are evocative in themselves. The first was called Open and Proactive. Counselors in this group embraced neuroscience enthusiastically, seeing it as a source of professional enrichment and scientific legitimacy. They positioned brain-based knowledge as something to be actively sought out, integrated into case conceptualization, and used to strengthen the credibility of counseling in an era when clients and institutions increasingly expect evidence grounded in biology. For these practitioners, the question was not whether to adopt neuroscience but how quickly and how deeply.

The second viewpoint, Cautious and System-Oriented, revealed a very different calculus. These counselors did not reject neuroscience, but they insisted that any adoption must be filtered through institutional and systemic realities. They worried about training infrastructure, about whether graduate curricula could realistically accommodate rigorous neuroscience content, and about the risk of superficial or misapplied brain talk spreading through the profession. Their stance reflects a familiar tension in professional fields: enthusiasm for new knowledge collides with the practical machinery of accreditation standards, coursework, supervision, and continuing education. Notably, the study’s reference list includes the standards of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs, suggesting that the authors situate these concerns within ongoing international debates about what counselor education should contain.

The third group was labeled Delimiting and Conditional Acceptance, and its members drew explicit boundaries around what neuroscience is allowed to do. They accepted that brain science has value, but only within carefully circumscribed limits, and they resisted any suggestion that neural explanations should displace the relational, humanistic core of counseling. This position echoes a long-standing scholarly argument, represented in the literature by work asking what neuroscience can and cannot answer. For these counselors, the danger lies in reductionism: the idea that a client’s grief, trauma, or anxiety could be adequately described in terms of circuits and neurotransmitters rather than meaning, relationship, and lived experience. Their acceptance was real but conditional, granted only where neuroscience serves the therapeutic work without colonizing it.

The fourth viewpoint, simply called Uncertain, may be the most consequential for the profession’s future. Counselors in this cluster expressed genuine ambivalence, torn between curiosity and doubt. They were unsure whether neuroscience was relevant to their daily work, unsure whether they had the background to evaluate its claims, and unsure what adopting it would mean for their professional standing. The researchers connect this pattern to the psychological literature on intolerance of uncertainty, which shows that ambiguity about new demands can heighten negative emotional states and paralyze decision-making. In a profession where confidence and self-efficacy shape the quality of clinical work, a substantial group of practitioners sitting in unresolved uncertainty is not a trivial finding.

What makes the study’s conclusion genuinely important is its refusal to interpret these four viewpoints as a simple spectrum from acceptance to resistance. The authors argue instead that each viewpoint represents a distinct configuration of interpretive framing, cognitive and affective readiness, professional identity, and institutional conditions. In other words, whether a counselor embraces brain science depends not just on what they know, but on how they make sense of it, how they feel about the uncertainty it introduces, who they understand themselves to be as professionals, and what their training systems and workplaces make possible. This framing draws on established theories of professional identity formation and on diffusion-of-innovations research, which has long shown that the adoption of new practices is a social and interpretive process, not a purely rational calculation of usefulness.

The practical implications are significant. If counselors occupy four different interpretive worlds, then a one-size-fits-all training program in neuroscience is likely to fail most of them. The authors argue for differentiated support: enriched, proactive training for those already eager to integrate brain science; systemic, curriculum-level planning for those focused on institutional feasibility; carefully bounded guidance that respects the limits of neuroscience for those wary of reductionism; and patient, confidence-building education for those still uncertain. This resonates with prior research, including surveys showing that many counselors receive little formal training in neuroscience-informed competencies, and with recommendations for dedicated graduate courses that translate brain science into clinically usable concepts rather than leaving practitioners to navigate the primary literature alone.

There are, of course, limits to what a single Q methodological study of thirty counselors in South Korea can establish. Q methodology yields substantive, pattern-based generalizations about the viewpoints that exist, not statistical estimates of how many counselors hold each one, and the findings are shaped by the forty statements the researchers composed and the specific professional context of Korean counseling, a field that has been actively debating regulation and professionalization. Still, the study offers something rare: a rigorous, empathetic map of how a profession actually thinks about a scientific frontier. It suggests that the future of neuroscience in counseling will not be decided by the persuasiveness of brain images, but by whether the field can meet counselors where they stand, in four very different places at once, and give each of them a credible path forward.

Subject of Research: Counselors' subjective viewpoints on the adoption of neuroscience in counseling practice

Article Title: Making sense of neuroscience in counseling: counselors’ subjective views on its adoption

Article References: Yu, M. H., & Lee, S. Y. (2026). Making sense of neuroscience in counseling: counselors’ subjective views on its adoption. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1581. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10053-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10053-4

Keywords: neuroscience, counseling, Q methodology, professional identity, counselor training, Current Psychology, South Korea, psychological resistance, diffusion of innovations, mental health, counselor perceptions, interdisciplinary integration