Dr. Strosahl is a leading innovator in the field of clinical psychology, and in 2009 received an award for outstanding innovations in psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Strosahl has spent much of his career advocating for, and developing models of, primary care behavioral health integration. He wrote many of the definitive early works on this subject and has helped over 100 health care clinics and systems in the United States design, implement and evaluate what is now known as the Primary Care Behavioral Health (PCBH) model. Dr. Strosahl developed a core competency-based system for re-training mental health clinicians that are moving into an integrated primary care service setting. This approach to training primary care and mental health providers to work together has been adopted by many health care systems around the country and continues to be used by many PCBH consultants and trainers. The core practice competencies identified in his approach to preparing behavioral health clinicians for success in primary care have heavily influenced the design of graduate level training programs for primary care behavioral health clinicians.

Dr. Strosahl is also a co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a “third wave” behavior therapy that has gained both nation-wide and international adoption and recognition within the mental health and substance abuse communities. Strosahl has been an integral influence on the development of ACT since its’ inception and has been an author on several seminal ACT texts (Hayes, S. Strosahl, K. & Wilson, K. (2011) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change. New York: Guilford Press) The ACT approach integrates the principles of mindfulness and acceptance, and value-based living, into a powerful treatment package that has been shown to work with a wide range of mental health and health related concerns. There are now in excess of 180 published studies of ACT as it is applied to a wide range of conditions.

Capitalizing on his years of experience working briefly in primary care settings, Strosahl began to innovate the longer-term ACT model into a brief therapy framework that could be applied in non-traditional practice settings, such as the health care context. In 2012, he and colleagues Patricia Robinson PhD and Thomas Gustavsson MSc, published a brief intervention version of ACT, appropriately named Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or FACT (Strosahl, K., Robinson, P. & Gustavsson, T. (2012) Brief interventions for radical change: Principles and practice of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications). FACT has been widely adopted both within mental health settings, as well as primary care and school-based clinic settings. Dr. Strosahl conducts FACT workshops and clinical training events both at home and abroad, and is best known for his simple, practical and clinician-oriented approach to training.

Dr. Strosahl has a long-standing interest in developing an evidence-based model for assessing and treating suicidal behavior. Along with colleague John Chiles MD, Strosahl wrote a classic text on the management and prevention of suicidal behavior that is now being published in a third edition (Chiles, J. & Strosahl, K. (2018) Clinical manual for the assessment and treatment of suicidal patients. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing). His pioneering, empirically based approach to treating suicidal behavior hasbeen adopted by many mental health systems of care, as well as practicing therapists. He continues to conduct workshops in this innovative approach across the country.