Dr. Michael Cameron's Gracious Introduction of His Mentor, Dr Paul Dores #mentoring #aba #behavior

I think that probably the most important thing you can do when introducing another person is to talk about their character and who they are from the standpoint of character. Character. Dr. Doris, yes, he went to UCLA and went to SUNY as well. He's done very impressive things in the field. But what I remember about Dr. Dori is, and I think all of you can relate to this, because if you take your finger and you trace it back and you think about your own influences in the field and, and who influenced your life and who was a mentor in your life at the early stages, every one of us in this room can do that. We can take our finger and trace it back. I traced my finger back to circa 1985, and the location was a little program, it was called Amigo, and it's located in Quincy, Massachusetts. Dr. Dóries was my first mentor really in applied behavior analysis. He was the person that guided me as a young, a very young professional. There was no task list from a behavioral analyst certification board. The behavioral analyst certification board did not exist. Dr. Dóries was the task list. He was the repository of all information. So anything that I needed to learn, any intellectual curiosity I had, any curiosity I had in terms of guidance, in terms of interventions and such, came as a result of his encyclopedic knowledge. And he guided me and had me read certain, certain articles that were relevant at that time from the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. He was the person, you know, that, that guided me step by step. He was also an ethical guide for me, and there was no BCBA-D, there was no code of conduct, there was no ethical compliance code at all. It was Dr. Dori's and his internal beacon that really guided me in terms of my practice and the work that I did. At Amigo, at that time, I have vivid images, one of which is a young man who was in a wooden corral the entire school day in a wooden corral, and that corral was probably about a 4x4 area. That's it. And in that wooden corral, he banged his head against the wooden rails to the point where he had open lacerations and scar tissue on his, on his forehead. And I was just a young buck, just out of just out of graduate school, all the best intentions in the world, but I had no experience managing somebody that was 18, 19 years old that was in a wooden corral in a school for 6 to 7 hours per day banging his head. And it was through my guidance that I received from Dr. Dóries that we were able to work with that individual successfully, dismantle that wooden corral, eliminate that wooden corral, have that individual engaged on a routine basis doing things that he should have been doing. It was because of this man in this room that that was made possible, because I really did not know how to manage that. These were the kind of things that we were encountering. That was the kind of mentorship that I needed. I frankly don't even see people mentoring individuals through these kind of scenarios any longer in terms of severe— now maladaptive behavior. What Dr. Dories did is very reminiscent for me of what Dr. Fox did in the movie called Harry, and many of you perhaps have watched it. Dr. Dories had that same influence. He had that same capacity to, to guide individuals through— me, a young clinician, guiding me through the process of responsibly and ethically treating individuals with very, very severe maladaptive behavior. So his wealth of knowledge ended up being translated into to very exquisite guidance for, uh, for me.

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