This episode of The Next Biz Thing turns its attention to Psychology Support Center, a Florida and New York practice that pairs psychoeducational assessment with counseling for teens and adults. Host Markus J. Diplama explores how evaluations for ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, learning disorders, and giftedness give families a map rather than a label, and why founder Sheila Simchon Ashkenazi’s dual training as a licensed school psychologist and licensed clinical social worker matters so much. The episode also looks at telehealth access across two states and the wider shift toward understanding neurodiversity as a profile of strengths. Listen in, and pass it along to someone who needs it.
How many people do you know who spent years being told they were lazy, or scattered, or just not applying themselves, when the truth was something else entirely? How many of them carried that story into adulthood, into their careers, into their relationships, never knowing that the right set of questions asked by the right person could have rewritten the whole thing?
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where I go looking for the businesses quietly changing how something works. Not the giants you already read about every morning, but the ones building something careful and genuinely useful, often in fields where careful and genuinely useful matter more than anything else. Today we are heading somewhere personal, into the world of psychological assessment and counseling, and the practice I want to tell you about is called Psychology Support Center.
Here is what drew me to it. In mental health and education, there is a gap that almost nobody outside the field talks about. On one side you have teachers, parents, and employers noticing that something is not clicking. A bright kid who cannot finish assignments. A teenager whose social world feels like a foreign country. An adult who has been managing beautifully on the surface for twenty years and is quietly exhausted from the effort. On the other side you have clinical services that can help enormously. What sits in between those two sides is understanding, and understanding is harder to come by than most people realize.
Psychology Support Center exists to close that gap. It is a practice built around two things that belong together but are often split apart, and I think that combination is the single most interesting thing about it. The first is psychoeducational assessment. The second is counseling for teens and adults. One tells you what is actually going on. The other helps you do something with that knowledge.
Let me start with the assessment side, because this is the part most listeners will be least familiar with. A psychoeducational assessment is a structured evaluation designed to understand how a person learns, processes information, regulates attention, and navigates their environment. Psychology Support Center offers these for ADHD, for autism spectrum disorder, for specific learning disorders, for giftedness, and for intellectual disabilities.
That list is worth sitting with for a second, because it covers an enormous amount of human experience. Learning differences are not rare. Attention differences are not rare. And yet the pathway to actually getting them identified, properly and thoroughly, is often confusing and slow. Families end up bouncing between school systems, pediatricians, and waiting lists, collecting fragments of an answer without ever getting the whole picture.
A proper evaluation gives you the whole picture. It is not a label handed down from on high. It is a map. It tells you where the strengths are, and there are always strengths, and it tells you where the friction is, and it explains why the friction exists. For a student, that map can unlock accommodations, targeted support, and a completely different relationship with school. For an adult, and this is the part I find genuinely moving, it can reframe decades of self blame into something that finally makes sense.
Now here is where the second half of the practice comes in. Understanding on its own is powerful, but it is not the finish line. Psychology Support Center also provides counseling for teens and adults, and the range they work across is broad and practical. Anxiety. Depression. Couples work. Social skills. Executive functioning. College transitions. Independent living skills. Stress management.
Look at that list again and notice something. Several of those are not what people typically picture when they hear the word therapy. Executive functioning. Independent living skills. College transitions. These are the everyday mechanics of building a life, and they are exactly where an assessment finding turns into real change. If an evaluation reveals that someone's working memory is where the bottleneck sits, then working on planning systems and follow through is not generic self improvement advice. It is precision work aimed at the actual thing.
That is what having both services under one roof buys you. The assessment informs the counseling. The counseling makes the assessment worth having.
Let me tell you about the person behind the practice, because in a field like this, the practitioner is the product. Psychology Support Center is led by Sheila Simchon Ashkenazi, and her background explains a great deal about how the practice is shaped.
She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a licensed and certified School Psychologist. She holds dual master's degrees, one in school psychology and one in clinical social work. She is licensed in Florida and in New York, and she is a Qualified Supervisor, which in practical terms means she is trusted to train and oversee other clinicians. She has nearly two decades of experience across education and mental health, and she has held leadership roles including Clinical Director and Director of Testing.
I want to draw your attention to that dual training specifically, because it is unusual and it matters. School psychology and clinical social work are two different professional worlds. School psychology lives inside the education system. It speaks the language of learning profiles, cognitive testing, classroom accommodations, and the machinery that determines what support a student actually receives. Clinical social work lives in the world of emotional health, family systems, relationships, and the lived context around a person.
Most clinicians are fluent in one of those languages. Sheila is fluent in both. So when a family walks in confused about whether they are dealing with a learning issue or an emotional one, they are not being asked to pick a lane before anyone has looked properly. That is a rare and very practical advantage.
The philosophy behind the practice is stated simply, and I think it is one of the better mission statements I have come across on this show. Meaningful change starts with understanding. Every individual deserves to feel seen, capable, and supported in reaching their full potential.
I like that because of the word order. Understanding comes first. Not diagnosis first, not treatment first. Understanding. And the goal is not just to feel better in some vague sense. It is to feel seen, to feel capable, and to be supported. Those are three distinct things and all three are necessary.
Her approach is described as thoughtful, direct, and compassionate, and the practice is explicit that the work does not stop at identifying difficulties. It moves to actionable strategies and to building long term success and confidence. Confidence is the word I keep coming back to. When someone has spent years thinking they are broken, and an evaluation shows them that they are not broken but wired differently, the confidence that follows is often the thing that changes everything downstream.
There is another piece worth mentioning, and it is about access. Psychology Support Center serves clients in both Florida and New York, and it delivers services through telehealth across both states. That is not a small operational detail. Specialist assessment and counseling have historically been geography dependent. If you lived near a major metro area with a strong clinical community, you had options. If you did not, you had a long drive and a longer waitlist. Telehealth across two large and populous states meaningfully widens who can actually reach this kind of care.
So let me zoom out, because I think this practice sits inside a bigger shift that is worth understanding.
For a long time, the conversation around learning and attention differences was dominated by deficit language. Something is wrong, something needs fixing. What has changed over the past decade or so is a growing recognition that a lot of what we called deficits are better understood as profiles. Different distributions of strength. A person with ADHD is not simply a person with less attention. They often have an attention system that works differently, with real costs in some contexts and real advantages in others. The same reframing has happened around autism, around dyslexia, around giftedness.
That shift only produces value if someone does the work of mapping the individual profile, and then translating it into practical strategy. That is precisely the work Psychology Support Center does. It sits right at the point where the modern understanding of neurodiversity meets the practical question of what do I do on Monday morning.
And there is a second shift running alongside it, which is that the age range for this work has widened enormously. Assessment used to be thought of as a childhood thing. Something you did at eight years old or not at all. Now, adults in their thirties, forties, and beyond are seeking evaluations, often after a child's diagnosis prompted a moment of recognition about their own life. A practice that offers counseling for teens and adults alongside assessment across the lifespan is built for that reality rather than the old one.
Why should you care about any of this if you are not currently looking for an evaluation? Because I suspect you know someone who is, or who should be. This is one of those areas where the bottleneck is rarely the availability of help. It is knowing that this kind of help exists at all, and knowing what to ask for. A lot of people are one conversation away from a piece of information that would change how they see themselves. Being the person who passes that along costs you nothing.
So if you or someone in your life has been circling questions about attention, learning, autism, giftedness, anxiety, or just the mechanics of building an independent adult life, Psychology Support Center is worth a look. You will find them online, and you can reach out from anywhere in Florida or New York. Go read about Sheila's background. Go read the philosophy. If it resonates, get in touch.
That is the episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. If today's story made you think of someone, send it to them, because that is genuinely how the businesses on this show find the people who need them.
I have been Markus J. Diplama, and this has been The Next Biz Thing. Until next time, keep an eye out for the ones building something worth building.