The founder and executive director the Institute for Behavior Change, licensed psychologist and certified school psychologist Steven Kossor, has been recognized by the US Congress, both houses of the Pennsylvania Legislature, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and by the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health for his visionary leadership in the creation of a successful community-based treatment model for children with serious mental illness symptoms. This treatment model has been in continuous use since 1981 and has been studied by independent researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who examined more than 300 treatment records and found a statistically significant association with reductions in physical aggression, noncompliance with adult prompts, socialization deficits and communication deficits in children between the ages of 2 and 17 with Autism, ADHD and other disabling conditions. This research was expanded in 2010 by independent researchers at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia which found comparable effects for treatment programs delivered over a one year time frame. Independent researchers at Immaculata University and Vilanova University have also found comparable results. More than 1,000 children have been treated successfully by the staff of the Institute for Behavior Change since 1996. Mr. Kossor lectures throughout the US to show how successful community based mental health treatment for children with mental illness symptoms could be implemented in any state in the US funded by Medicaid (in most states, regardless of family income) and how to maximize the probability that parents get and keep funding for their child’s treatment until the treatment is finished successfully.
About IBC founder Steve Kossor 