Alyse Kerr is the President and CEO of Integrative Counseling Services and founder of the nonprofit Integrative Mind and Body Services. She grew up in New Milford with her mom and younger sister, Courtney—both of whom now work in her practice. A graduate of Blue Ridge High School, she began her college journey at Broome Community College in Binghamton, NY, eventually transferring to East Stroudsburg University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. She went on to complete a master’s in School Counseling from the University of Scranton and later began a Ph.D. program in Health Promotion at Marywood University.

Alyse’s career began at NHS, working with individuals diagnosed with intellectual disabilities and co-occurring mental health conditions. She became the first person certified globally to provide this dual-diagnosis treatment and led one of Pennsylvania’s two pioneering teams.

In 2012, she launched Integrative Counseling Services, which has grown into one of the largest private mental health practices in Northeastern Pennsylvania—operating over 15 locations and providing more than 45,000 therapy sessions a year, including in-school mental health services to several local districts and provides counseling support to college students.

In 2023, she founded Integrative Mind and Body Services in Scranton—one of the few centers nationwide offering advanced neurofeedback and biofeedback. The nonprofit was born from her own long COVID recovery journey and aims to make cutting-edge treatments financially accessible and available close to home.

Busier than ever, Alyse is working on launching another nonprofit to bring free mental health services into schools. We met Alyse and her dog Harper in one of her two downtown Scranton offices to learned more about the life-changing neurofeedback and biofeedback work her staff is providing and we had to ask, Why NEPA?

How long have you lived in NEPA?

All my life—44 years.

What do you love about your town?

I think New Milford and Lake Ariel have some things in common. So my jobs—jobs, plural—can be fairly fast-paced and very busy, so I like going home to quiet. It’s definitely not this—being here, and the traffic, and the sounds, and all of that.

When I go home, even though I still live on a busy road, I live in a more rural area. So for me, its the quiet. The last few years, I’ve really gotten big into hiking and being outdoors, so accessibility to being out in the woods or hiking trails—and my fiancé and I always take her with us.

So it’s the quiet, for me—definitely. In both New Milford and Lake Ariel, there are pros and cons. But for me, after crazy long days—no disrespect to Scranton—I can’t wait to get out of here. After I’ve been here 12, 13, 14 hours, I want to go home to the quiet.

What’s your favorite NEPA restaurant?

I’m going to give you a two-for there, depending on my mood. I love Italo’s in Scranton — the burritos are amazing. The other one is an odd one — Tree at the spa at The Lodge at Woodloch. I love that place. I always said, you’ll know I’ve made it if I can ever eat this way every day. That’s how you’ll know — when I have somebody making me that kind of food. Fresh, seasonal, no preservatives, no trash. Somehow making healthy food taste good. That’s how you’ll know I made it.

So yeah, Italo’s — good for my soul. Good for the heart. And Tree. I just like the clean eating, the atmosphere.

What’s your favorite thing to do in NEPA?

Now, it’s hiking. Anything outside — hiking, skiing, power sports, going to the lake — anything like that. So anything that’s outside, really. For me, I love the outdoors here. There’s a lot of opportunities and it’s good because Harper can go, and she loves being outside. We tried to make her a therapy dog, and she’s like, ‘I’m actually not. I’m an outdoor dog.’

We hit Promised Land State Park a lot, just for physical proximity. I don’t have a ton of time in my schedule, so if I just want a quick walk, there are definitely different trails kind of within a 20-minute drive of my house that we’ll hit up. Lackawac Sanctuary is definitely one of my favorites. Love it up there. So we’ll hit that quite a bit — it’s quiet, it’s nice, it’s close.

It’s tougher for me to travel sometimes. But if I’m just sitting at home and I think, OK, I don’t feel like working anymore, we’ll just go to Lackawac or Promised Land and go for a couple miles. We did that Monday — just grabbed a couple miles outside while there was actual sun. Get some real vitamin D.

What’s next for you?

Next for me will be the new nonprofit, Empowered Resilience, for the schools. I’m really, really excited about that. That work has been incredibly well received by the community. I think it really helps folks, especially in the rural areas.

If you’ve got three or four kids, and you’ve got maybe one car, two cars, and everyone’s got an activity, you can only be at one place at a time. Sometimes it’s tough to access therapy. And again, given just the nature of where mental health is, it’s not accessible anyway. There are only so many evening appointments that are after school, after work.

So for me, next will be the nonprofit for the schools. We’re super excited about that — to be able to make that more widely available and again take the uninsured, underinsured kind of parts of the equation and be able to focus on the actual care. That will be my next big thing, hopefully coming in fall of this year.

We’re just waiting on our 501(c)3. Then we’ll be able to start launching that, and we’ll transition the schools that are already with us in the for-profit world first, and then look to bring in additional schools as we’re able to.

Where do you see NEPA heading in the future?

I’m hopeful that NEPA will continue to grow and be able to offer services or experiences that you typically have to travel for. A lot of people leave the area, whether that be for work or play or both. So I would hope that Scranton continues to be a place where people want to stay, versus feeling like they have to leave to go somewhere else.

So I’m hopeful that Scranton and Northeastern PA will continue to allow people to stay, work and afford to be able to do that. I’m hopeful there will be some type of balance between what it costs to be here and what you can make to exist here.

Why NEPA?

A lot of times it’s family — I mean, I think doing the type of work that I do, the people that you’re serving become like a second family. You become very intimately involved in their lives. They’re coming in, they’re sharing everything about themselves.

I think that is a unique part of what we do, because we have that kind of intimate connection to people as we’re trying to help them through trauma, or depression, or anything they’re going through — relationship issues. We just have that connection with people that I think is unique because of the work that we do. So how do you leave that? And I think Northeastern PA deserves it — the same as New York City, as Boston, as Los Angeles.