July 1, 2016

July 1, 2016 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my sixteenth response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” by Donohue et al. (1998). Those who believe in folk psychology insist “that scientific research is best accomplished by group experimental designs.” The research which consists of “large groups of subjects” deals with averages, which doesn’t tell us anything about the individual. Behavioral science would have been more popular if more behaviorists would have chosen to apply science to changing the behavior of those who are suffering from mental health issues. 

Behaviorists with clinical experience make much more sense and are easier to be understood.  I am such a behaviorist. Sadly, for the most part, radical behaviorism isn’t practiced in the mental health field. What is practiced is a watered down version of radical behaviorism called cognitive behaviorism. The “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” are the same as the so-called cognitive distortions that cognitive behaviorists want their mental health clients to believe in.

To the radical behaviorist a person’s private speech has no causal status. Although private speech as well as public speech are both caused by environmental variables, what a person ends up saying or thinking to him or herself, his or her private speech, is mediated by the neural behavior of his or her body, which was conditioned by the extent to which it was exposed to circumstances in which there was Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The manic behavior of a person with Bipolar Disorder goes hand in hand with negative self-talk and is indicative of a history of mainly NVB, which always occurred in abusive, hostile and chaotic environments. When one treats clients with such histories and hears these histories over and over again, one realizes that the path to recovery must consist of learning to prevent the environments which have caused the client's problems.