By Laurel White
When Michael Mohr was 15 years old, he had a diving accident during varsity swim team practice. The pool’s starting blocks had been in the shallow end of the pool, 3 ½ feet deep, and he struck his head on the bottom of the pool practicing a racing start.
A spinal cord injury from the accident made Mohr a quadriplegic.
As a teenager getting his first taste of independence at the time of the accident, Mohr faced the challenge of navigating the path toward adulthood amid his recovery. The people he met during his rehabilitation — therapists, counselors, and fellow patients — ended up being crucial figures on that path.
“The people I met during that time showed me that living with a spinal cord injury didn’t mean you couldn’t achieve your goals and do what you wanted to in life,” he says.
Mohr would go on to earn his bachelor’s degree in history, and then a law degree, both from UW–Madison. After graduation, he focused on patent and commercial litigation, doing disability rights advocacy work when his often intense work schedule allowed. In his free time, he also found himself drawn to the study of psychology.
“I happened upon some books and articles that really caught my attention,” he says. “It spurred a new fascination for me.”
As time passed, Mohr found this new interest outside of law growing. It was time for a change — one that would lead him to join a field of professionals who had positively influenced his life more than a decade before.
A lesser-understood field doing great work
Rehabilitation counseling is a field many people outside the disability community don’t know about or understand.
Susan Smedema, professor and former chair in the School of Education’s Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, says she discovered the field as a recent college graduate doing online searches about advanced degrees. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a longstanding passion for working with people with disabilities — her first job was in a group home for people living with severe autism and similar disabilities — Smedema hoped for a program of study and credential that would build her expertise and ability to support disabled individuals. She just wasn’t sure what that was.
“I don’t think we’ve done a great job marketing ourselves over time,” Smedema says. “It can be frustrating at times, because I think we’re a great profession and do great work.”
Broadly, the goal of rehabilitation counseling is to help people living with disabilities and chronic illnesses achieve their life goals through counseling and case management.
“We’re focused on helping people not only survive, but flourish,” Smedema says.
Perhaps adding to its mystique, the field of rehabilitation counseling has the unique distinction of being created by the government.
In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Sears Veterans Rehabilitation Act. The new law allowed the recently created Federal Board of Vocational Education, which was spurred by the industrial revolution, to provide services for veterans disabled during World War I. Two years later, Wilson signed the Smith-Fess Act, which established the first federally funded program to assist civilians with disabilities.\
In the roughly hundred years since the field’s inception, it has grown rapidly. Smedema says recent years in particular have seen a broadening of counselors’ focus from helping clients gain and maintain employment to supporting their holistic well-being.
“There’s a broader focus on helping individuals achieve whatever life goals they have for themselves, things like education pursuits, leisure pursuits, and independent living goals,” she says.
Smedema also points out that the pool of clients eligible for rehabilitation counseling is much broader than many people may assume. Any type of disabling condition makes someone a candidate for such support, including mental health disorders, chronic illnesses, and a number of autoimmune disorders.
At UW–Madison, enrollment in the master’s in rehabilitation counseling program has increased steadily over the past several years. In part, that increase could be attributed to its stellar reputation. Last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked it the top graduate program of its kind in the country. The No. 1 ranking, which is on U.S. News & World Report’s four-year ranking cycle and won’t be revisited until 2027, cements the program as a national leader.
The makings of a No. 1 program
Smedema says the stellar research happening within the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education is one of the reasons the rehabilitation counseling program has gained national renown.
Kyesha Isadore, an assistant professor in the department, focuses her research on how intersectionality impacts mental health, with special attention to race, gender, and disability. She recently published a paper in the journal Counseling Outcome, Research, and Evaluation exploring counseling dropout rates for international college students with disabilities.
Isadore says her personal experiences with stigma around mental health and disability in communities of color, including seeing how that stigma exacerbated mental health challenges, led her to the field.
“I wanted to be a person to be there for people of color with disabilities, to process different experiences they’re having and support their overall well being and mental health,” she says. “Then I was exposed to research and the role of research in advocating for different marginalized groups, and how we can use research to highlight disparities and not just focus on disparities and negative outcomes but the protective factors, the things that support their mental health in a positive way.”
In addition to research and teaching, Isadore provides mentorship and supervision to practicing counselors.
Other research in the department includes professor Timothy Tansey’s groundbreaking work leading the Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center for Quality Employment. In 2021, Tansey received a $16.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Rehabilitation Services Administration to create the center, which aims to increase the number and quality of employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities. The center serves those goals and the vocational rehabilitation community by facilitating information sharing, identifying best practices, and providing technical assistance.
Additional research projects across the department are wide-ranging and include examinations of employment and psychosocial aspects of chronic neurological conditions, supported employment and psychiatric rehabilitation, the long-term impact of long COVID diagnoses, and the negative consequences of “self-stigma” for those suffering from mental illness.
Students in the master’s in rehabilitation counseling program also benefit from the program’s commitment to providing robust field experience. While national accreditation requirements only mandate 100 hours of experience working in professional settings outside the classroom before an internship, students in UW–Madison’s program log more than 300.
“Our students graduate with a whole lot more hands-on experience,” Smedema says. “We have an incredible dedication and passion for training high-quality counselors who have the ability to go out and change the lives of people living with disabilities.”
Strong ties to service providers including the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, Madison College, Edgewood College, Journey Mental Health, and UW–Madison’s McBurney Disability Resource Center help make that commitment to robust “real world” experience possible.
Finding meaning in supporting others
In fact, the connection between the program and UW–Madison’s McBurney Disability Resource Center has one particularly strong facilitator: alumnus Michael Mohr.
For the past 8 years, since his graduation with a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling, Mohr has worked as an access consultant at the center. Through his work, Mohr helps students get the accommodations and resources they need to succeed on campus.
“I would say my job is a healthy mix of counseling, advocacy, and case management,” Mohr says. “I meet with students, try to feel out what resources we have to make sure they are on a level playing field, help them self-advocate, and do some advocacy on their behalf as well.”
Over the course of a year, Mohr helps make sure more than 500 students get what they need to fully engage, learn, and grow at UW-Madison.
He says he finds deep meaning in that work, because he knows the power of a good education to build a good life.
“Higher education has been crucial in the development of my identity, it has helped me come into my own as a person with a disability,” he says. “Now I can be in a position where I can help others get access, so they can achieve success at school. It’s a great feeling.”