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 letter, authored by psychiatry educators at five institutions, makes a deceptively simple case: medical student educators must not only spark interest in psychiatry as a career but also cultivate a foundational appreciation of the specialty among all future physicians, whatever field they ultimately enter. The authors contend that early, intentional engagement of preclinical students represents a critical and underutilized opportunity to shape attitudes, build clinical skills, and ultimately strengthen the psychiatric workforce. Their argument is grounded in a growing body of evidence about how and when specialty choices actually form.

Research on career decision-making in medicine suggests that the path to psychiatry often begins well before medical school. Prior experiences, including backgrounds in the humanities, service activities in mental health settings, and a strong social orientation, have been shown to predict interest in the field. During medical school itself, clinical psychiatric experiences and positive institutional, faculty, and peer attitudes toward psychiatry further reinforce that interest. Attitudes toward mental illness and the specialty of psychiatry are demonstrably shaped by the quality of contact students have with psychiatric patients and psychiatrists, which makes the timing and design of those contacts a matter of practical consequence.

The most striking data cited in the letter come from the 2025 Association of American Medical Colleges Matriculating Student Questionnaire and Graduation Questionnaire. Among students who matched into psychiatry, only 22.1 percent expressed interest in the specialty at the time they entered medical school. A remarkable 57.1 percent were initially interested in a different specialty, and 13.9 percent were undecided. In other words, roughly seven in ten future psychiatrists arrived at medical school without psychiatry in mind. For educators, that statistic reframes the problem: the task is less about recruiting students who already know their destination and more about engaging, informing, and converting learners throughout their education.

To illustrate what that engagement can look like, the authors describe programs developed independently at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the University of California San Diego, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. Although each institution built its offerings separately, the programs converge on a shared set of strategies, suggesting that certain approaches to early psychiatry exposure may generalize across very different institutional contexts. The authors organize these efforts into four categories of pre-clerkship exposure: preclinical, clinical, longitudinal, and extracurricular.

On the preclinical front, the Psychiatry Student Interest Group at UT Southwestern was expanded to address the scarcity of psychiatry content in the first two years of the curriculum. The group provides a near-peer mentoring community, hosts regular presentations showcasing careers in psychiatry, compiles research opportunities, and has recently developed a database of shadowing opportunities. Notably, students drive the programming while faculty play a supporting role, championing student initiatives and liaising with student affairs. The authors argue that interest groups of this kind create a community of belonging for students curious about psychiatry long before they set foot on a clinical rotation, a psychological mechanism that may matter as much as the informational content itself.

Clinical exposure before the clerkship is exemplified by the CARES program, short for Compassionate Action and Real community Engagement in Service, at UC San Diego. First- and second-year medical students are matched with a faculty mentor for three half-day clinic sessions per quarter, beginning with observation and progressively working toward direct patient contact. This longitudinal preceptor model allows students to explore specialties of interest, including psychiatry, while building clinical skills and professional identity in an authentic and supportive environment. For psychiatry faculty, serving as a CARES mentor offers a structured way to make an early impression on students at the very stage when the majority of future psychiatrists are still leaning toward other fields.

Longitudinal and community-oriented pathways are highlighted at Baylor College of Medicine, where students can pursue the Dean’s Distinction in Service Learning, a multi-year program combining community service engagement, service-learning educational activities, a reflective exercise, and a symposium presentation. Several of the community sites serve people with psychiatric illness, substance use disorders, and other vulnerable populations. Additional pathways, including the Psychiatry Residency Outreach to Public Sector program and Albert Schweitzer Fellowships, allow students passionate about community mental health to connect their personal values with sustained service. The design principle is continuity: rather than a single lecture or a one-off volunteer day, these programs weave psychiatric populations and mental health settings into a student’s experience over years.

The extracurricular category spans two distinct models. At the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a fourth-year Psychiatry Student Chief program places selected senior students in a structured leadership role: they lead review sessions, hold office hours, remain available on an as-needed basis for clerkship students, and serve as liaisons between students and faculty. Faculty cultivate the chiefs’ skills as near-peer educators. The model addresses two pressures at once, easing the high-stress nature of clinical rotations and the increasing competitiveness of psychiatry residency, while giving junior students accessible, relatable guidance from peers who have just navigated the same terrain. At Dell Medical School, meanwhile, students connect with psychiatry research through their interest group, meetings with the Associate Chair of Research, and research meet-and-greet events. A unique third-year exploration year allows students to devote an entire year to psychiatric research, a departmental travel scholarship supports scholarly work, and fourth-year students, including visiting students, can choose from nine month-long research electives, with invitations to departmental and school-wide showcases making the resulting work visible.

Taken together, the five institutional portraits support the framework the authors propose: engaging medical students in psychiatry across the continuum of training through exposure opportunities that span preclinical, clinical, longitudinal, and extracurricular domains. No single program is sufficient, and no one approach is right for every institution, but the underlying principle is consistent. By intentionally creating multiple, varied touchpoints with psychiatry early in medical education, faculty can meaningfully shift students’ perceptions of, and interest in, the specialty. The convergence of independently developed programs on similar strategies offers a form of natural replication that strengthens the case that these methods are transferable rather than idiosyncratic.

The authors are explicit that the psychiatric workforce shortage will not be solved by residency training alone. It requires upstream investment in the first and second years of medical school, in student interest groups, in research mentorship, and in near-peer relationships. A consistent theme across all five institutions is that these programs require a dedicated faculty champion to thrive, a finding that carries practical weight for departments weighing where to spend limited faculty time. The authors invite educators elsewhere to reflect on the engagement opportunities already present in their environments and to consider where new programs might take root, arguing that looping in learners early is not merely good recruitment but good medical education. For a specialty facing a shortage measured in the tens of millions of underserved Americans, the earliest years of training may prove to be the most consequential.

Subject of Research: Strategies for engaging pre-clerkship medical students with psychiatry to strengthen the psychiatric workforce

Article Title: Looping in Learners: Strategies to Connect Medical Students with Opportunities in Psychiatry

Article References: Russo, R. A., Thomas, L. A., Escamilla, K., Raml, D., & Pershern, L. S. (2026). Looping in Learners: Strategies to Connect Medical Students with Opportunities in Psychiatry. Academic Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02455-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02455-0

Keywords: psychiatry, medical education, workforce shortage, medical students, preclinical exposure, mentorship, student interest groups, near-peer teaching, clinical preceptorship, research electives, specialty choice, Academic Psychiatry

The scale of Ohio’s shortage of licensed behavioral health providers is difficult to overstate, particularly in rural and low-income communities. Residents in these areas may wait months for an appointment, travel long distances to reach a clinician, or go without care entirely during a crisis. The scholarship program is engineered to close that gap not simply by training more clinicians, but by training and retaining clinicians who are committed to working where the need is greatest. Every student who accepts a scholarship must sign a binding service agreement committing to work in an eligible underserved Ohio community for a period equal to the number of years they receive scholarship support. It is a model borrowed, in spirit, from loan-forgiveness frameworks in medicine, but applied here at the graduate level and targeted specifically at mental health and substance use treatment.

The qualifying employment settings read like a map of Ohio’s safety net. Scholars may fulfill their commitment at community behavioral health centers, federally qualified health centers, school-based health clinics, and child advocacy centers. They may also serve at behavioral health providers participating in OhioRISE, a specialized managed care program for youth with complex behavioral health and multisystem needs, or at nonprofit providers where Medicaid is the primary payer. By anchoring the service requirement to these settings, the state is directing its investment toward children, youth, and underserved populations — the groups most likely to fall through the cracks when the clinical workforce thins out.

At the University of Cincinnati, the program is a deliberate collaboration across three disciplines: social work, mental health counseling, and clinical psychology. The university will receive approximately $1.2 million in scholarship funding, and eligible graduate students may receive full in-state tuition coverage for fall 2026. Notably, tuition may be reimbursed retroactively after a student is accepted into the scholarship program, a provision that could deliver immediate financial relief to students who have already paid for the current term. Scholarships may also be eligible for renewal in spring 2027, fall 2027, and spring 2028, giving students a multi-year funding runway through the completion of their degrees.

The tuition scholarships are only part of the financial architecture. An additional $2.5 million is available through an independent agreement with Health Impact Ohio to fund $4,000 internship stipends paid directly to students during their field placements. Field placements — the supervised clinical practicums that graduate trainees must complete before licensure — are typically unpaid or minimally paid, forcing many students to work outside jobs while accumulating clinical hours. Direct stipends during placements remove one more economic obstacle between students and clinical training, and they signal that the state views the practicum year as work of genuine public value rather than a rite of passage to be endured.

For program leadership at UC, the timing is not incidental. Dana Harley, PhD, project director for the OBHS Program at UC, professor and master of social work program director, pointed to the changing federal landscape of graduate financing. Providing these scholarships will reduce the educational debt of students, she said, which is extremely important at a time when federal graduate student loans have been limited due to legislative changes. The remark underscores a structural tension in the behavioral health pipeline: clinical careers in community settings rarely pay enough to service heavy graduate debt, and when federal borrowing becomes less available, students from modest backgrounds may be priced out of the professions entirely. Scholarships that erase tuition, paired with placement stipends, are a direct countermeasure. We are delighted to train these future clinicians to provide services to some of the most vulnerable populations in Ohio, Harley said.

Eligibility is defined tightly. Accelerated, full-time, and part-time graduate students who are currently enrolled qualify, but incoming students do not — a design choice that channels the first wave of funding to students already embedded in Ohio’s training programs and closest to entering the workforce. Three UC programs are included. The Master of Social Work in the College of Allied Health Sciences integrates classroom learning with a field practicum, building clinical skills in assessment, intervention, and case management, and prepares graduates to pursue licensure as licensed social workers and licensed independent social workers in Ohio. The Master of Arts in mental health counseling, housed in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services and Information Technology, trains students to provide individual, group, and family counseling across a range of mental health and substance use concerns, grounded in culturally responsive, evidence-based practice, with supervised clinical practica that lead toward licensure as licensed professional counselors.

The third UC pathway is the doctorate in Clinical Psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences, which offers rigorous training in psychological assessment, evidence-based intervention, and applied research. Doctoral students complete supervised clinical hours across a range of populations and settings, culminating in an American Psychological Association-accredited internship before graduation, and emerge prepared for licensure as psychologists and for careers spanning clinical practice and academic research. Amanda La Guardia, PhD, professor and counseling program coordinator, noted that the clinical counseling program in the School of Human Services has a consistent record of interprofessional collaboration across campus, resulting in supportive grant funding for students as they study to become professional counselors throughout Ohio. That cross-campus coordination — social work, counseling, and psychology drawing on a single pool of state scholarship dollars — is itself a technical achievement, requiring aligned eligibility criteria, coordinated advising, and shared reporting to state agencies.

The application process is deliberately simple in structure. Current graduate students interested in the scholarship apply through their respective programs, and the application includes a personal statement explaining why the student is interested in working with Ohio populations from disadvantaged backgrounds. That requirement does more than filter for commitment; it frames the entire program around a question of vocation. The state is not merely buying clinical labor with tuition dollars — it is identifying students whose professional identities are already oriented toward underserved communities and removing the financial friction that might otherwise push them toward higher-paying private practice. If the model works, the returns compound: each scholarship year purchased is a service year delivered in a community behavioral health center, a school-based clinic, or a child advocacy center, precisely where Ohio’s shortage is sharpest. For a state confronting a behavioral health crisis with a thinning clinical workforce, the $18 million wager is that the fastest route to more care is not more buildings or more programs, but more people — trained, licensed, and rooted in the communities that need them most.

Subject of Research: A statewide Ohio scholarship program to expand and retain the behavioral health clinical workforce

Article Title: University of Cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce

Article References: University of Cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: behavioral health, workforce development, Ohio Behavioral Health Scholarship, University of Cincinnati, mental health workforce shortage, social work, mental health counseling, clinical psychology, graduate scholarships, underserved communities, substance use treatment, OhioRISE