The History and Evolution of Behavioral Approaches and Positive Behavioral Interventions

Derrick Dufresne: That's the easy one to talk about because you can say "We missed it. We missed it in the interview. We missed it as part of our screening." What tends to happen, and my own case being a perfect example of what I talked about before, about being willing because we needed to come up with a shock program for… Harry.

I went to Farm & Fleet and bought a portable cattle prod. And I remember checking out and having this clerk say to me, "You must be putting down a big one," and I'm going to use it on Harry. And I remember feeling incredibly uncomfortable, but we had the approval of the Governor, which I'm not impressed with, Human Rights Committees, Ethics Committees, 'cuz what can happen is, if you allow stuff on the menu at all, there's ways you can always ratchet it up to say, "This is such a thing."

You know the only reason we didn't use this? 'Cuz on the way back in the car, I shocked myself. I pulled over to the side of the road, and I said, "If we're going to do this on another human being, I want to see what this feels like." And when I did it to myself, I immediately made a decision I will never do this, and then I made every single person on the unit, including all of the clinicians, shock themselves before we did it to Harry. And once we got to some of the therapists, in particular the psychiatrist, they said, "I'm not putting that thing on myself." I said, "This program's dead."

We have got to have a different standard about whether or not something works, and that… that's the problem with saying "Well, it works," because you can keep ratcheting up stuff to the point where it will work, but it not only dehumanizes the person receiving the abuse, it dehumanizes the person delivering it. And I think that's unconscionable.