Personality disorder programme No longer a diagnosis of exclusion

Home > Outcome > Treatment > Interventions

Interventions

There are a range of mental health interventions and psychological therapies available for Personality Disorder.

These include:

This is based on a developmental model of personality
Treatment is generally long term
The aim of therapy is to understand the way in which the past influences the present with the use of interpretation
Treatment focuses on the therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist, the individual’s emotional life, and defences
Therapy uses the relationship between patient and therapist (transference) as a way to understand how the internal world of the individual affects relationships

Postulates that a set of partially dissociated ‘self-states’ account for the clinical features of
borderline personality disorder
Rapid switching between these self-states leads to dyscontrol of emotions including intense expression and virtual absence (depersonalisation)
Therapy aims to formulate these processes collaboratively,examining them as they occur in treatment as well as in life experiences

This is a modification of standard cognitive and behaviour therapy that is goal directed and focused more on altering underlying belief structures rather than reduction of symptoms
It is likely to take up to 30 sessions of treatment of which the initial ones help to define the areas of intervention by identifying what are the fundamental structures of past, present and future experiences
The therapist and patient maintain a collaborative therapeutic alliance throughout treatment and include homework and testing of core beliefs and structures

This is a special adaptation of cognitive therapy, originally used for the treatment of women with borderline personality disorder who harmed themselves repeatedly
DBT is a manualised therapy including functional analysis of behaviour, skills training and support (empathy, validation of feelings, management of trauma)
Directed at reducing self-harm

Therapeutic communities provide intensive psychosocial treatment which may include a variety of therapies but where the therapeutic environment itself is seen as the primary agent of change
They include democratic and concept types, the former including members of the community as decision makers
External control is kept to a minimum: members of the community take a significant role in decision making and the everyday running of the unit