NEUROFEEDBACK AND RECIDIVISM
Doug Quirk went to a meeting in Boston in 1970 and heard Barry Sterman talk about his work with cats and human epileptics. Doug had lunch with Barry and on his recommendation bought an Autogenic 120a EEG feedback device. Quirk moved to the Ontario Correction Institute where he has spent more than 20 years improving an excellent facility. OCI has the lowest recidivism rate in the Western World. CRIMINALS IN JAIL Quirk has now completed two studies of recidivism among OCI felons who have been discharged. He compared 55 pairs of high risk felons half of whom were treated and half received only counseling. These violent felons demonstrated the subictal pattern on the DDT (viz., they didn't handle visual angles as well as visual curves) and on the EEC. His treatment included volunteer administered SCARS EEC training of the sensori-motor rhythm at C-3 and C-4 as described by Sterman. These felons required an average of 33 half-hour sessions of SMR training. Two years after his initial study of 55 pairs, and two years after a second study of another 110 felons between 20% and 40% of the treated felons had been rearrested. This rate of recidivism compared to 65% to 85% among the matched felons who were not treated by biofeedback. In other words, 60% to 80% of the treated felons were still free, while only l5% to 35% of the untreated felons had managed to remain free. Quirk has treated 150 more felons using the same method of SCARS and SMR neurotherapy, matched with felons receiving only counseling. The data on recidivism in this last study is still being collected. An intriguing finding is that recidivism is a function of the number of training sessions. Half as many felons who were treated for 16 sessions were successful at remaining out of jail as were those who received 32 sessions. There is some effect of training even in a few treatment sessions. PENISTON Peniston and others have been initiating their program using temperature training of the hand. One of the rationales for this training is to demonstrate nonverbally to the client how biofeedback works. Temperature tracks GSR in a sluggish manner and may be measuring the same domains in anxiety of arousal, viz. general arousal through the BSR (enough activity to register learning), anxiety (the size of the GSR), and variability as a measure of the arousal of the ANS. SUMMARY THROUGH A LONG AND DISTINGUISHED career Douglas A. Quirk has demonstrated the power of precise applications of biofeedback to populations in which common practice has no utility. Prisoners notoriously become worse in correctional institutions. It is a clichù that we are very good at making seriously criminal adults out of moderately delinquent juveniles. Moreover, there is a general agreement in the field that we are unable to do anything positive with schizophrenics other than to put them into a chemical straightjacket or allow them to age out of their disease. Doug's insight that schizophrenics and criminals may be deficit in imagination, or oversupplied with frightening paranoid visions caused him to standardize a method of presenting graded trauma to patients, viz. the library of slide projected pictures he used in SCARS. Monitoring arousal through the venerable and well researched GSR permits a precise and useful control of a hierarchy of stress. Finally, applying Sterman's work with epileptics to a sub-ictal population resulted in a quantum leap in effectiveness. In a careful study of 260 young violent prisoners Quirk was able to demonstrate that it is possible to reduce recidivism from 80% to 40% using relatively inexpensive, volunteer applied techniques. In an earlier study of 151 women whose average time on a closed ward had been 9 years Quirk demonstrated that 143 could safely be discharged after using inexpensive, a volunteer applied biofeedback technique. Quirk's elegant combination of several hypotheses implies that our own success using neurotherapy to remediate a different population may be enhanced by structuring our own assessments more elegantly in terms of a similar hypothesis as to the nature of ADD and the other disorders which neurotherapy may benefit. These EEG responsive disorders appear to have a common characteristic in that they seem mediated through the physical structures in the diencephalon within which the limbic system functions. These disorders may be similar to but more subdued than partial seizure with complex symptomatology. 1
George von Hilsheimer, March 1995
George von Hilsheimer, Ph.D. * 125 S. Swoope Ave #109, Maitland, FL 32751 * 407-644-6464
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