Michael Ross, MSW, LCSW, PhD (ABD) Candidate

Professional Summary

Mike Ross, PhD, MSW, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, educator, and translational researcher whose work explores social cognition, resilience, behavioral health, and human-centered systems design. He serves as Director of the Bachelor of Social Work Program and Assistant Clinical Professor at Indiana University Bloomington.

Ross holds a PhD in Social Psychology. His doctoral research examined emotional bonds and psychological vulnerability in digital environments, with particular attention to emotional connections with artificial intelligence and thoughtforms. His work considers how sustained attention, emotional investment, narrative, and social reinforcement can cause digital agents, imagined entities, symbolic constructs, and collectively held ideas to assume meaningful psychological and relational roles in people’s lives.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington and a Master of Social Work in Mental Health and Addiction from Indiana University Indianapolis. He also holds a graduate certificate in Homeland Security and Emergency Management from Indiana University Bloomington.

Clinical Experience

Ross brings more than fifteen years of clinical experience across the behavioral health continuum. His experience includes inpatient crisis care, forensic settings, community mental health, outpatient therapy, and private practice. He has served children, veterans, first responders, and justice-involved populations experiencing trauma, addiction, and toxic stress.

He is trained in several evidence-based clinical modalities, including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive processing therapy, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based approaches, and narrative therapy. His clinical work focuses on strengthening cognitive resilience and psychological durability during crisis, adversity, and significant life transitions.

Ross also maintains a private practice focused on supporting veterans and first responders.

Public Service and Policy Leadership

Ross spent nearly a decade in senior leadership with the State of Indiana, working across behavioral health, criminal and juvenile justice, substance-use prevention, suicide prevention, veterans’ mental health, disaster response, public safety, and community resilience.

From 2018 to 2025, he served as Behavioral Health Division Director for the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute. In this role, he rebuilt Indiana’s Local Coordinating Council network from 74 active councils to 92—restoring a coalition in every county. One of the nation’s oldest and most robust community networks addressing substance-related harms, the councils support locally driven prevention, treatment, recovery, and public-safety efforts. Ross also served concurrently as Youth Division Director, leading statewide juvenile justice, youth-services, grantmaking, and policy initiatives.

His statewide appointments included the Indiana Governor’s Challenge to Prevent Suicide Among Service Members, Veterans, Families, and Caregivers; the Byrne SCIP Crisis Intervention Advisory Board; the Mental Health Policy Advisory Council; the Indiana Executive Council on Cybersecurity; and the State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup.

Earlier, Ross served as Indiana’s State Director of Disaster Mental Health. He standardized disaster behavioral-health training, developed a statewide concept of operations, founded the Hoosier Hope Initiative, and established Resilience and Emotional Support Teams, or REST. These scalable, mission-ready teams strengthened Indiana’s behavioral-health response to disasters, mass violence, public-health emergencies, and other complex crises.

Ross also expanded Indiana’s PsySTART capabilities, helping make it one of only three states at the time with the full evidence-based service portfolio. He independently secured $2 million in non-expiring funding for mass-violence preparedness and aligned state systems with federal all-hazards guidance. His work included FEMA earthquake planning, counterterrorism and cybersecurity collaboration, open-source threat analysis, and contributions to statewide school-safety recommendations.

Concurrently, Ross served as Bureau Chief for Adult Mental Illness, Veteran Mental Health, and Suicide Prevention, overseeing more than $20 million in evidence-based, trauma-informed, and recovery-oriented programs. He guided the restructuring of Indiana’s suicide-prevention efforts and helped develop a statewide framework for implementing the Zero Suicide model.

Ross began his state leadership service as the first Clinical Director of Recovery Works, which connects justice-involved individuals with behavioral-health and substance-use treatment. Across these roles, he managed complex public programs, rebuilt statewide systems, and translated behavioral science into practical policy and infrastructure serving communities throughout Indiana.

Scholarship and Publications

Ross’s work emphasizes translational scholarship that bridges research, policy, clinical practice, and systems change. He has authored book chapters and scholarly publications on resilience, cognitive security, trauma-informed crisis management, and the psychological dimensions of complex emergencies. His work also includes contributions to cybersecurity and behavioral science literature.

His publications have appeared in outlets such as Domestic Preparedness and NATO-affiliated publications. He has contributed to national policy reports, government advisory research initiatives, and interdisciplinary efforts focused on behavioral health, public safety, and cognitive resilience.

Ross also engages broader audiences through public scholarship, media appearances, presentations, and podcasts. He has appeared on programs including MAD Warfare, The Cognitive Security Institute Podcast, and Pandas Playing Cello. These conversations have explored cognitive resilience, mental health, crisis response, psychological influence, and meaning-making in digital environments.

He has presented his work at national and international conferences and forums, contributing to interdisciplinary conversations involving social work, psychology, behavioral health, public policy, security, resilience, and emerging technologies.

Teaching

At Indiana University, Ross teaches practice-oriented courses that connect research, policy, theory, and behavioral science with real-world social work practice and systems leadership. His teaching emphasizes critical thinking, evidence-informed practice, professional identity, community engagement, and the application of social work knowledge to complex social challenges.

He developed SWK-S 300: Crisis and Disaster Social Work, a course designed to help students understand the roles of social workers in disasters, mass trauma, public-health emergencies, mass-violence incidents, and other complex crises.

His teaching experience also includes:

• SWK-S 371: Social Work Research
• SWK-S 423: Organizational Theory and Practice
• SWK-S 519: Community and Global Social Work
• SWK-S 618: Social Policy and Services

Through these courses, Ross helps students connect social work research and theory to policy analysis, community practice, global perspectives, crisis intervention, and systems-level change.

Research Interests

Ross is an experienced qualitative researcher whose work examines social cognition in digital environments, cognitive resilience, online disinhibition, human–agent relationships, and the psychological effects of emerging technologies. Building on his dissertation, his ongoing research explores bidirectional fictophilia—the experience or perception of reciprocal emotional bonds between individuals and fictional, imagined, or artificial agents—and how these relationships shape attachment, identity, vulnerability, agency, and meaning-making.

His research on thoughtforms considers how narratives, symbols, imagined entities, and digital personalities can acquire psychological salience and a perceived sense of autonomy through sustained attention, emotional investment, repetition, and social reinforcement. Rather than reducing these experiences to pathology or literal truth claims, he studies them as psychologically and socially meaningful relationships shaped by human needs, cultural narratives, and technological environments.

Ross also examines liminality and what he calls the fog of living: the challenge of navigating disrupted identities, uncertain outcomes, competing narratives, and incomplete information. His concept of cognitive aikido describes the ability to engage destabilizing ideas and psychological pressure with flexibility and discernment, redirecting their momentum toward reflection, adaptation, and purposeful action rather than rigid reaction.

More broadly, his scholarship explores humor, paradox, symbolic cognition, and “high weirdness” as potential resources for resilience, transformation, and collective sensemaking. He integrates qualitative inquiry, social psychology, social work, and human-centered systems design to better understand how people and institutions preserve agency amid uncertainty and technological change.

Too Weird To Fail Initiative

Ross is the founder of the Too Weird To Fail initiative, which explores cognitive resilience, narrative psychology, symbolic cognition, liminality, and meaning-making in uncertain environments. The initiative supports translational research, interdisciplinary dialogue, creative inquiry, and public scholarship.

In his book, Too Weird To Fail: The Righthand Path of the Sacred Laugh, Ross—through a mythopoetic narrative—examines humor, storytelling, paradox, and symbolic cognition as tools for strengthening psychological adaptability and personal agency during disruption. His companion workbook, Too Weird To Fail: The Cosmic Workbook for Greydivers, extends these ideas into a more interactive and applied format, creating space for readers to reflect on uncertainty, identity, meaning, resilience, and their relationship with the strange. Together, the two works combine conceptual exploration with opportunities for personal reflection and practice.

The initiative explores how people move through the fog of living without surrendering their capacity for wonder, critical thought, ethical action, or psychological flexibility. It considers how individuals can remain open to mystery and unconventional experiences while also maintaining discernment, groundedness, and awareness of their own cognitive vulnerabilities.

This work includes the concept of cognitive alchemy, which describes the process of transforming adversity, ambiguity, psychological stress, and destabilizing experiences into resilience, insight, meaning, and creative problem-solving.

Cognitive aikido functions as a complementary idea within this framework. Where cognitive alchemy emphasizes transformation, cognitive aikido emphasizes movement: the ability to meet uncertainty, contradiction, or psychological pressure without becoming immobilized by it. Together, these concepts offer a language for understanding how people can preserve agency while navigating liminal spaces, disruptive experiences, and rapidly changing technological environments.

Through Too Weird To Fail, Ross connects behavioral science with narrative, humor, culture, technology, spirituality, and unconventional forms of inquiry. The initiative treats curiosity and disciplined skepticism as complementary rather than opposing forces and explores how people can engage strange or anomalous experiences without abandoning either compassion or critical thought.

UAP Policy Research

Ross also contributes to interdisciplinary research concerning anomalous experiences and unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. His work focuses on trauma-informed, recovery-oriented, and person-centered policy frameworks that support the ethical engagement of individuals reporting extraordinary experiences.

His approach emphasizes stigma reduction, psychological safety, human dignity, ethical research practices, and evidence-guided care. Rather than presuming a specific explanation for anomalous experiences, his work focuses on how clinicians, researchers, institutions, and policymakers can respond responsibly and compassionately to the individuals reporting them.

This work is informed by his broader research on thoughtforms, liminality, narrative, and the psychological effects of uncertainty. He is especially interested in how extraordinary experiences can disrupt identity and meaning, place individuals in prolonged liminal states, and intensify the fog of living by complicating their understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Ross developed the UAP Experiencer Engagement Policy Framework with the Society for UAP Studies. The framework promotes dignity, ethical research standards, responsible scientific inquiry, and respectful engagement with experiencers.

Human Factors, Mental Health, and Cybersecurity

Ross’s work in human-centered cybersecurity advances a central proposition: mental health and well-being are integral to cybersecurity. He approaches cyber risk as a whole-person and whole-system issue shaped not only by technology and policy, but also by stress, trauma, fatigue, cognitive overload, workplace culture, and the conditions under which people make consequential decisions.

Drawing on clinical social work, social psychology, behavioral health, crisis leadership, and public safety, Ross promotes a holistic, strengths-based, trauma-responsive, and non-punitive approach. Rather than describing people as cybersecurity’s “weakest link,” he views their judgment, agency, relationships, adaptability, and capacity for recovery as essential security assets. He advocates for psychologically safe cultures in which individuals can report mistakes, manipulation attempts, burnout, or cognitive overload without fear and shame becoming barriers to early detection and learning.

His concept of psychological firewalls examines how emotional regulation, self-efficacy, distress tolerance, cognitive reframing, humor, and cognitive flexibility can strengthen resistance to social engineering, coercion, narrative manipulation, and stress-based persuasion. He presented this work to the Cognitive Security Institute in Mental Health and the Psychological Firewalls of Cognitive Security and has been regularly invited to participate in CognectCon and related Institute programs.

His work also examines sextortion, cyberinfluence, and the weaponization of shame. He is particularly interested in how cyber attackers exploit anticipated shame, fear of exposure, social stigma, and threats to identity or relationships to coerce behavior and discourage victims from seeking help or reporting an incident. This thematic area reinforces his emphasis on victim-centered, trauma-responsive, and non-punitive approaches to cybersecurity.

Ross coauthored NIST Special Publication 1332, Workshop Summary Report for ConnectCon 2024: “Minding the Gaps in Human-Centered Cybersecurity,” which identified psychological stress, cognitive overload, and decision fatigue as major cybersecurity challenges. He also coauthored Advancing Human-Centered Cybersecurity: Challenges and Pathways Forward, published in IEEE Security & Privacy.

Across this work, Ross seeks to expand cybersecurity beyond protecting systems to strengthening human capacity. He maintains that mental well-being is part of security architecture, workforce readiness, threat resistance, incident response, resilience, and recovery. His goal is to help organizations move beyond fear, shame, blame, and compliance-only models toward security cultures grounded in agency, compassion, psychological safety, sound systems design, shared responsibility, and durable human resilience.

Cognitive Security and Liminal Warfare

Ross’s work in cognitive security examines how individuals, organizations, and communities can preserve sound judgment, psychological well-being, and agency amid manipulation, uncertainty, and technological disruption. He approaches cognitive resilience as more than resistance to misinformation; it also depends on mental health, emotional regulation, social connection, critical thinking, and the ability to function under stress and ambiguity.

While presenting at the NATO Defense College’s 55th Conference of Commandants in Rome, Ross introduced his formulation of liminal warfare. The concept describes conflict conducted within ambiguous thresholds—between peace and war, truth and fiction, civilian and military activity, authentic and synthetic communication, and online and offline experience. Such environments can sustain uncertainty, disrupt shared meaning, and weaken the confidence individuals and institutions need to make decisions.

Across this work, Ross emphasizes that cognitive security should protect human dignity, autonomy, and psychological resilience. His goal is to help people remain grounded, discerning, and capable of purposeful action within the increasingly complex cognitive battlespace.

Professional Mission

Through scholarship, clinical practice, teaching, public service, and policy engagement, Ross advances the adaptive power of social work. His work demonstrates how translational social science can strengthen interventions, communities, public policy, public-safety systems, and systems of care.

Across his professional roles, he seeks to translate complex interdisciplinary ideas into practical approaches that improve human well-being and help individuals and institutions navigate crisis, uncertainty, and change.

At the center of this mission is an interest in how people retain agency while moving through liminal spaces and the unavoidable fog of living. Through his work on thoughtforms, cognitive aikido, cognitive alchemy, narrative, and resilience, Ross examines how individuals can encounter complexity without becoming overwhelmed by it, remain open without becoming ungrounded, and transform uncertainty into opportunities for adaptation, connection, and purposeful action.