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Fordham Graduate School of Education faculty members Jennie Park-Taylor, Ph.D., and Merle Keitel, Ph.D., recently published An Intersectional Approach to Counseling Children and Adolescents with Health Conditions. This book addresses a critical gap in current counseling literature by providing mental health professionals and students—across counseling, medicine, psychology, social work, and other helping professions—with practical insights and suggestions for working with children and adolescents who experience significant health issues.
Park-Taylor and Keitel believe their book will serve as a vital resource for professionals and students. It offers a reference to focus on specific health conditions, helping readers develop their knowledge, skills, and awareness of the cultural and systemic factors involved in working with children, adolescents, and their families. Special attention is paid to how both the clients’ and counselors’ intersectional social identities influence the counseling process.
“This book fills a much-needed gap in the counseling texts currently available,” said Park-Taylor. “We wanted to offer mental health professionals and students something practical—something that directly speaks to the realities of working with children and adolescents who are navigating significant health issues.”
Park-Taylor and Keitel also recognize the broader need for clinical resources that address the complexity of the human experience.
“Cultivating a future generation of counseling scholars and practitioners who can effectively work with a diverse clientele in an era of globalization and rapid technological advances will require clinical resources that attend to the complexity and totality of the human physical, social, and psychological experience.” Their inspiration for writing the book, as Park-Taylor explained, “came from both the realization of a significant gap in the literature on providing mental health services to diverse children and adolescents with health concerns as well as from our work with graduate students who are passionate about various areas of health psychology.”
The writing process was collaborative and rewarding for the authors. “From submitting our proposal to the publisher to making our final edits, the whole process felt very collaborative and fun,” Park-Taylor said. She added that working with an exceptional group of chapter authors brought expertise and creativity to the project.
One key lesson Park-Taylor emphasized was the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. “We realized how important it is to expose both students and professionals to content that might not be part of their standard graduate training,” she noted. “Medical and psychological issues are so deeply intertwined, yet most programs teach them separately.” This book seeks to bridge that gap.
This article was contributed by Leah McKirgan.
