Extra Quirky Behavioural Psychotherapy

Douglas Quirk and I met when we were both members of an informal behaviour therapy club that met in Toronto at the behest of a local psychiatrist, Dr. John Jameson, and we became colleagues for decades, before his death in 1997. He was a genius and he could write faster than I could read. Extra Quirky Behavioural Psychotherapy is a series of case studies mainly from before he joined me in the psychology department at the Ontario Correctional Institute.

The treatment of choice in these cases studies was Wolpe’s Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, in which he described a learning-based deconditioniong procedure known as Systematic Desnsitization. In essence, It involves teaching the client to relax and then, while relaxed, to approach the trigger stimulus (event) at a rate slow enough for the client to be able to maintain the relaxation. Assuming that the event is not currently harmful, this results in the eventual pairing of relaxation with the event, which teaches the body/mind that its proper response to that kind of trigger stimulus is relaxation rather than arousal. That is, the client learns at a gut level that there is no need to get “all cranked up” about that kind of event. Hence, no more distress!

To aid in this process, Quirk invented what he called Stimulas Conditioned Autonomic Response Suppression (SCARS), In which Wolpe’s systematic desensitization is supplemented by a biofeedback procedure in which relaxation is “rewarded” – often with additional stress! – which helps the body to learn to relax in the presence of situations to which the client has been responding with distress. Unfortunately, while SCARS is very powerful and capable of addressing almost any psychological condition, it remains practically unknown, so I have published it now as a separate book. Quirk was a good psychotherapist but not a very good publicist.

Perusal of the various sections of this book shows how widely this approach is both applicable and effective:

• Sex (to get your attention)

• Sexual Offences

• A-Sexuality

• Sexual Anomalies

• Fear

• Anger! Territoriality: The Intolerable Excitement

• Physical Health Problems

• A Quick Look at Brain Damage – Impairing Impairment

• Madness! Exploring the Never-Never Land of Schizophrenia, the Bewildering Disease

• Criminality

• A Flake’s Mistakes – Errors of Understanding and Action

• Accessory Therapeutic Agents – Weighty Waiting

• Psychology as a Profession