GIVE BACK

HISTORY: In the 1940s, medical science learned to keep people with severe head injuries alive. It had no idea how much they might recover, nor any ways to help them recover. In the 1960s, ordinary (non-specialized) medical, mental health, educational and rehabilitation services were used to help people with head injuries to recover. They didn't work. In the 1970s, the first long-term research appeared, indicating that very few survivors achieved full recoveries on their own. In 1974, the National Head Injury Program of Israel invented a unique, high-intensity treatment procedure called cognitive rehabilitation, specifically designed for head injury recovery. Its methods are still considered to be the state of the art. Beginning in 1978, the faculty of the Israeli program began to transplant their program to American hospitals. In 1980, Dr. Yigal Gross brought the program to Robert Wood Johnson Rehabilitation Center in New Jersey. In 1982, GiveBack's Dr. Larry Schutz was hired to lead one of their treatment teams. In 1991, Dr. Schutz came to Orlando's Brain Injury Rehabilitation Center at Sand Lake Hospital to supervise the outpatient cognitive rehabilitation program. In the 2000s, managed care has closed most of the head injury programs in this country. In 2003, Dr. Schutz proposed to his outpatient head injury group (including Becky Dedo, Tim and Tammy Cramer, and Myles Higby) that they create a new kind of self-help program for people who never received cognitive rehabilitation. In 2004, Becky agreed to assume the role of program coordinator. The graduates of the outpatient program who had achieved the best recoveries were invited to contribute to the program. In 2005, psychology students from the University of Central Florida volunteered to join the organization, and GiveBack, Inc. was born.