Often, behavioral problems are a reality that both family members and professionals related to the field of intellectual disability encounter in their daily lives.
This issue leads to very high social, personal, and family consequences, as it is very common to find that these individuals are excluded from daily tasks or decisions, as well as from usual contexts (expelled from their workplaces or leisure activities), sometimes leading to their basic needs for social interaction and support from others being ignored.
What do we understand by challenging behavior?
Emerson in 1995, defined challenging behaviors as those behaviors that, due to their intensity, duration, or frequency, negatively affect the individual’s personal development, thereby reducing their opportunities for community participation.
These types of behaviors pose a challenge and/or a difficulty for professionals and family members who live with them, when it comes to understanding and addressing them, which is why this type of behavior is currently known as “challenging behaviors”.
Types of challenging behaviors
Many times, challenging behavior is understood as all those that involve aggression or violent behaviors. However, there are other more discreet ones that should also be known.
Thus, we could speak of challenging behaviors when dealing with:
- Self-harm, where the person causes harm to themselves. These would be behaviors such as biting one’s hand, pulling out nails, banging one’s head against the wall, etc.
- Destruction of objects, when there is an intention to break or destroy things in their environment, such as glass, furniture, their own clothes…
- Heteroaggressive behaviors, referring to voluntary aggressions carried out towards family members, professionals, or unknown people who are nearby at that moment.
- Offensive social behaviors, referring to offenses towards other people, with insults, spitting at others, threats, and even nudity in public settings being frequent.
- Disruptive behaviors would refer to behaviors in which one voluntarily interferes with the tasks or activities of other people, disturbing the environment. With shouts, voluntary crying, reprimanding colleagues, etc.
- Withdrawal behaviors and lack of attention are some of the most silent and, therefore, least mentioned behaviors, but they generally involve emotional problems, and would be evidenced by signs such as significant loss of attention, sitting far from other people, postures of discouragement…
- Atypical and repetitive habits refer to behaviors that, being unusual, are repeated over and over again, such as pica (eating dirt or non-edible objects).
We can get a clear idea of the great variability that exists in challenging behaviors, and therefore, it will require a specific evaluation and intervention for that person.
Shift in the intervention paradigm
Challenging behaviors are not an aspect linked to intellectual disability. It is important to understand that they are maladaptive and harmful, in addition to understanding that for the person, they are functional (they are serving a function or purpose) and to interpret them as a demand for support made by the person, as they are evidencing their difficulties in coping with that situation in
a more adaptive way.
Current intervention methods start from a person-centered approach, where their closest social group is taken into account. Functional evaluations are carried out to determine the causes, and complex training and learning programs for alternative behaviors are developed, which are systematically reinforced by the person’s close environment.
This new approach provides a much more complex and complete line of intervention than those previously followed, where the person’s support needs are taken into account and it does not focus solely on behavioral management, but on learning as a means to improve the quality of life of the person with intellectual disability and their family.