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Some might ask, Why does JRC seem so out of step with the rest of the mainstream providers of services to students with behavior disorders? Isn’t the whole services delivery world going to “Positive Behavior Supports?”

There are a few answers:

1. Positive Behavior Support (“PBS”) is, admittedly, a very attractive label and a very attractive ideology. We all would like to believe that difficult things can be accomplished easily and positively, and that difficult behaviors can be successfully treated with positive procedures only. No one likes “negative” procedures no one likes to have to administer any pain or discomfort to children, particularly to developmentally disabled persons. Given a choice between a “positive” procedure and a procedure that involves the administration of a brief amount of pain, the lay person will naturally prefer the positive procedure. Problems develop, however, when it is discovered that there are some severe behaviors that do not respond to positive procedures alone.
    

2. Those in the PBS movement are a strong political and advocacy force. They have managed to get regulations and even legislation passed that ban, or make it extremely difficult to use, aversives in behavioral treatment in some states. They refuse to allow papers that employ aversives to be published in their own journals. They have threatened to picket presentations that involve aversives. It now requires courage for any psychologist to do research in the field of aversives or to use them in his or her practice.

   The political/advocacy muscle that the PBS people wield is exemplified in what they were able to accomplish with respect to the 1989 National Institute of Health Consensus Conference on Developmental Disabilities. To the dismay of the PBS enthusiasts, the Conference concluded that behavioral skin shock (including the SIBIS device, which is the forerunner of JRC’s GED device) was a scientifically acceptable decelerative treatment procedure. Dr. Richard Foxx tells the story of how effectively the PBS advocates used their political muscle to try to counter the work of the Consensus Conference in his paper, “The National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on the Treatment of Destructive Behaviors: A Study in Professional Politics[1].” The full text of this article may be found here.
    

3. Since 1971 JRC has been using the science of behavior (behavioral psychology) and its allied technologies to find and provide the most effective, least intrusive form of treatment possible. Many if not most persons in the human services field base their work and approach not on behavioral science but rather on certain human services ideologies such as Positive Behavior Support, inclusion, social role valorization, normalization, and person-centered values. JRC has been fishing in the science stream since 1971, with considerable success. The advocates have so much political/advocacy muscle that they have been able to move the mainstream largely away from the science stream.

[1] Jacobson et al, Controversial Therapies for Developmental Disabilities, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005, pp 461-476.