Biography
About
Michelle J. Barker is a Doctor of Clinical Social Work. She earned her DSW from the University of Kentucky, where she now teaches graduate-level psychopathology. She is also a licensed social worker.
Her work has centered for more than three decades on people whose emotional lives are difficult for systems to hold: adults with developmental disabilities and dual diagnoses, young people whose distress is read as behavior, and the families standing next to both. It began in service delivery rather than in a seminar room, and the scholarship came afterward, as an attempt to account for what the service delivery kept running into.
She founded and led Stepping Stones-A Life Foundation, which grew into one of the largest parent- and individual-selected, privately managed case management agencies serving adults with developmental disabilities and dual diagnoses in New Jersey. Building an agency that families choose rather than are assigned to is a particular discipline: it makes the relationship between a person and the people paid to help them the unit of the work, and it makes every failure of that relationship visible immediately. Her contribution to person-centered planning has been recognized with the Distinguished Professional Award from Opportunity Knocks and with Loyal Heart Awards from the Middlesex County Chapter of the New Jersey Coalition on Women and Disabilities.
What that work produced, over years of it, was a question that no individual case file could answer: why the same families arrived at help so late, and why the difficulty that finally brought them through the door was so rarely the difficulty that had been forming for a decade. She returned to school to take the question seriously.
University of Kentucky
Doctoral research
She completed the Doctorate of Clinical Social Work at the University of Kentucky in May 2026. Her capstone research, now published, developed a treatment framework for young people whose emotional dysregulation has already begun to organize their relationships, aiming to intervene before that pattern consolidates into personality pathology. The argument is transdiagnostic: the mechanism, rather than the category a child is eventually assigned, should be the focus.
That framework is the spine of her first practitioner book, and the reason the second one turned toward siblings, who sit closest to the mechanism and are almost never assessed for it.
Youth Emotional Dysregulation as a Transdiagnostic Vulnerability
Doctoral capstone presentation, University of Kentucky
Watch on YouTubeIn the classroom and beyond
Teaching and practice
She teaches graduate-level psychopathology at the University of Kentucky, which places her in front of the clinicians who will spend the next thirty years deciding what a struggling young person is being asked to carry. She has supported people living with emotional dysregulation and mood-related disorders in her professional practice and in her own life. That second vantage point, of standing beside someone you love while waiting for the right help to arrive, is what shapes how she writes about what families need and how long they are asked to wait for it.
She writes fiction for the same reason she reads it. The people are invented, and the rooms are ordinary, and what she is watching in them is what she has always watched.
Education
- DSW, Doctor of Clinical Social Work, University of Kentucky, 2026
- MSW, Sacred Heart University
- BA Psychology, minor in Sociology, Georgian Court University
Appointment and licensure
- Instructor of Psychopathology, University of Kentucky College of Social Work
- LMSW · CSWA
Interests
Outside of her professional work, Dr. Barker enjoys writing fiction, tending her gardens, traveling, spending time near the water, and discovering places with rich stories and history. She values meaningful time with her family and has a special affection for animals, especially her kitten, Pearl. Whether she is working on a novel, exploring a coastal town, or enjoying a quiet afternoon with a good book, she is continually drawn to the experiences and relationships that reveal the complexity of the human story.