Dr. Karl Mitchell's international association helps students and mental health professionals share knowledge, develop leadership skills and reduce stigma.

For Dr. Karl Mitchell, helping people seek counseling begins with changing how they understand it. He wants mental health care to become an approachable part of everyday wellness, something people turn to before they reach a crisis.

That goal helped inspire the East Texas A&M University assistant professor of counseling to establish the International Association for Wellness Counseling (IAWC) in 2024. The organization began its first full year of activities in 2025, bringing together students, educators and mental health professionals to share knowledge and advance wellness-based practices.

Mitchell hopes the association can help normalize counseling and make it something that's sought out first instead of as a last resort.

Through conferences, professional development, publications and freely available resources, the association is creating opportunities for people to learn from one another across professional and cultural boundaries.

Making Wellness More Accessible

Mitchell's vision grew from more than 20 years of experience in mental health settings. His work has included children, adolescents, older adults, refugees, foster care clients, college students and people experiencing substance use problems.

Across those settings, wellness became a central part of his professional identity. While working in Corpus Christi, he developed weekly “Wellness Wednesday” workshops where university students could explore different topics and ask questions.

The IAWC extends that work to a broader community.

“Our vision is for every person to achieve optimal wellness across their lifespan,” Mitchell said.

He describes wellness counseling as incorporating evidence-based assessments, treatment plans and interventions within a wellness framework. Exploring different areas of clients' lives can help counselors identify concerns and explain how those concerns connect with treatment.

“Making that process understandable is especially important when people are unfamiliar with counseling or associate mental health care with something being wrong,” Mitchell said.

The association provides expert-contributed resources addressing topics such as school counselor wellness, faculty wellness, relationships, caregiving and veterans. Its offerings also include continuing education webinars, a wellness counselor certification and a counselor directory.

For practicing professionals, these resources offer opportunities to explore approaches they might incorporate into their work. For students, they provide an introduction to a professional community beyond the classroom.

Connecting Across Borders

The IAWC has held two World Conferences, including an in-person gathering at ETAMU's Dallas campus this past spring. Its October Wellness Counseling Summit combined activities in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with virtual presentations. Mitchell coordinated the virtual component.

The events bring together counseling students, clinicians, counselor educators and other professionals to discuss wellness and exchange ideas.

Mitchell sees international collaboration as an opportunity to share “different ways of working with clients that we may not have considered.”

Those exchanges can introduce participants to different interventions and strengthen their understanding of how people experience wellness across cultures.

The association also publishes a monthly newsletter and is developing Wellness Counseling Quarterly, an open-access research journal intended to welcome quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods and conceptual manuscripts.

Students Growing Through Service

For Katherine Lam, an ETAMU doctoral candidate in counselor education and supervision, involvement in the association has offered opportunities to practice leadership while contributing to the profession.

Lam received the association's Wellness Counseling Doctoral Student of the Year award. She has served as a doctoral student representative and chair of its Communication, Media, and Public Relations Committee and now serves as an editorial assistant.

“This award is a significant milestone in my doctoral journey,” Lam said. “It reminds me of how much I have grown both personally and professionally throughout my doctoral studies and how meaningful it has been to connect with a community that shares my passion for wellness and counseling.”

A licensed professional counselor, Lam said those responsibilities have strengthened her communication and leadership skills while reinforcing the importance of collaboration.

“I have learned that being a counselor is not just about supporting clients in the counseling room,” she said. “It is also about being part of a community, continuing to learn from one another and finding ways to make wellness a part of the conversations we have and the work we do.”

That connection between learning and service reaches across ETAMU's Department of Counseling. The department offers a bachelor's degree in human services, master's programs with emphases in clinical mental health counseling, school counseling and student affairs, and a doctorate in counselor education and supervision.

Dr. Mitchell's work with the IAWC is a good example of how, for East Texas A&M faculty, the mission to serve often extends beyond the classroom.