Dr. Poling Bork is the Founder of Selective Mutism Foundation (mutism.ca) a non-profit organization that aims to assist those with selective mutism. She has nearly 20 years of personal, professional, and clinical experience in treating children with selective mutism (SM). All three of Dr. Bork’s children have suffered from SM, so she has made it a personal mission to assist others impacted by it.

Over the past 15 years, Dr. Bork has been an invited speaker for numerous conference presentations and workshops around the world. She is known as being an effective presenter and has received multiple teaching awards for excellence in teaching.

As an active researcher who pioneered using technology to treat SM, Dr. Bork is currently conducting research on how to incorporate virtual reality and artificial intelligence to improve the treatment process.  She has published peer-reviewed studies and resources in relation to SM. In one study*, Dr. Bork demonstrated how she successfully treated children within 130 minutes each.

This is remarkable, especially since these children had long-standing SM and had received numerous failed interventions prior to Dr. Bork’s involvement. Due to this, Dr. Bork is detailing the entire process in her new book (in press) “Vocal: Help Your Child Conquer Selective Mutism in <3 hours with a proven strategy”, so that everyone will be able to access this easy to understand information which tend to be reserved for the research world!

*The study “Video self-modeling, fading, and reinforcement: An effective treatment of children with selective mutism” is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2019).