Hello again, number one. This is Dr. Nigro again with our next episode of psychology and plug.

Thanks to all of our listeners. Thanks for all your comments. Appreciate all of your feedback.

Hopefully you found last week's episode on suicide and the police informative. It's definitely a topic

that we will come back to both from a law enforcement perspective and also from mental health perspective.

Today I want to focus on behavioral modification.

How do we change people's behavior?

And we'll try to focus primarily on children and adolescents, although the techniques really can

transcend any age group.

And this has been a really challenging time during the pandemic because, you know, Massachusetts,

there's a lot of in-home services that have been put on hold in-home behavioral therapy services

in-hap therapy mentoring a variety of services for youths and adolescents so behavioral modification is

essentially what it is it's modifying someone behavior, typically the maladaptive behaviors. But to do so

really requires a structured approach. And I am going to refer to the work of Ross Green,

who's out of Massachusetts. And he has a technique, which is called the basket technique.

And you could find it in his book, The Explosive Child.

And even though I primarily do psychological and neuro psychological evaluations,

I have worked with a number of families on developing and successfully implementing behavior

modifications program based on this model.

So prior to the most current version of the diagnostic manual, we really had only very few disorders for which to diagnose children with behavior problems.

And the go-to was oppositional defining disorder or conduct disorder, which is the amped-up version.

And interesting note, the research of Russell Barkley, untreated, undiagnosed ADHD is the precursor to antisocial

personality disorder. That'll be a separate topic in love itself. So when implementing a model like this, the irony is it really is the work of the parents, the caregivers, the educators to successfully implement this plan as opposed to the child or adolescent.

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