Good Psychiatric Management and Dialectical Behavior Therapy

"Treatment options for borderline personality disorder (BPD) have vastly improved over the last three decades with the development of evidence-based psychotherapies. Dialectical behavior was the first of these modern treatments to bring new hope that BPD-with its concerning and complex profile of emotion dysregulation, self-harm and suicidal behaviors, impulsivity, and interpersonal instability-could in fact be treated effectively. Manualized empirically validated treatments specially tailored to treat the problems of BPD have fostered optimism about clinical interventions for individuals with BPD. Generalist approaches to BPD care, such as good psychiatric management (GPM), open new horizons to expanding care options so that more mental health professionals can be sufficiently educated to treat people with BPD. This book provides a framework for implementing a stepped care model in settings where access to specialized treatments is limited, drawing on GPM and integrating principles drawn from DBT"--

Anne K.I. Sonley, J.D., M.D., FRCPC, is Lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Psychiatrist at the Borderline Personality Disorders Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Lois W. Choi-Kain, M.D., M.Ed., is Director of the Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.