Research on our S-CAT® Program
Click here to Donate Now! Help Rid the Silence of Selective Mutism through Research, Training, and Treatment!
The SMart Center is excited to announce that the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry has published a groundbreaking study on the efficacy of Dr. Elisa Shipon-Blum’s Social Communication Anxiety Treatment (S-CAT)® Program in treating children with selective mutism (SM).
The research, “Social Communication Anxiety Treatment for Children and Families with Selective Mutism: A Pilot Study,” appears in the March 2016 issue of the prestigious journal. See a summary of the research results showing statistics and graphs.
Principal investigators Dr. Evelyn Klein and Dr. Sharon Armstrong, associate professors at LaSalle University. assessed the effectiveness of the S-CAT® Program in treating 40 children aged 5-12 years with SM. The study tracked and analyzed the progress of the patients for changes in social communication in the home, public and school settings during 15 weeks of S-CAT® treatment.
According to the article, the researchers became interested in the S-CAT® Program because of “its potential for delivering therapy in a shorter time frame compared to previous therapies.”
And after evaluating the results, the answer is an emphatic YES! The study found that over the research period of less than four months, the children made statistically significant improvements in their ability to speak in school and other social settings following S-CAT® therapy as measured by the Selective Mutism Questionnaire (SMQ).
The research also indicated that the most significant progress was made by children whose families and schools closely implemented the strategies, goals and games provided by the SMart Center treating professional.
The results of this research reinforce and validate the success that we have been seeing at the SMart Center for years.
The research was conducted through the Selective Mutism Research Institute (SMRI), a privately funded institute dedicated to researching and disseminating new options and advances for treating the widely misunderstood and frequently misdiagnosed disorder known as selective mutism.
TO access our most recent research results on SM, click here