Reality Therapy: Helping People Help Themselves

Efforts to redirect the behavior of persons who violate laws, customs, and morals are often unsuccessful, perhaps because we tend to view behavior different from our own as evidence of mental illness of some kind or degree. We ignore legal, cultural, and other idiosyncratic determinants of who may be "okay" today and who may be in trouble tomorrow, and instead seek patho logical explanations for nonconforming behavior. Many people have been harmed by our insistence that human behavior is un derstandable and thereby treatable only in terms of mental health or mental illness, a dogma that has compartmentalized, isolated, and stigmatized those who, for one reason or another, act uncon ventionally. This paper explores a more humanistic, economic, and societally productive alternative for changing behavior and considers its application and availability to offender groups in particular. Reality therapy departs radically from the conven tional treatment orthodoxy. The conceptual differences between the two approaches as well as the basic steps for practicing reality therapy are also outlined and discussed.