When she would give feedback about ways that they could change and improve their symptoms, they felt like she was saying that it was all their fault. When she was trying behaviorism, the patients would respond feeling like the therapist was saying that they were the problem. So she wasn’t particularly tied to a model of psychotherapy. She felt like the population she was working with was in hell and she wanted to be able to get them out any way that she could. And so she was dedicated to, as she would say, getting them out of hell. And she’s one that had a personal interest in helping all of the patients that she saw. She came out in the New York Times over the last few years and acknowledged that she had severe mental illness when she was in her late teens. She had her own struggles with mental illness. And so she went from one treatment to another almost in a black and white fashion, from one end of the continuum to another and found that neither was effective.Īnd so Linehan very much wanted to help this population. If we look at humanism or the humanistic approaches as being at one end of the continuum and we look at behaviorism as being at the other end of the continuum, they’re fairly opposite. She was willing to take a step back and consider that this other approach, humanism, would be more an appropriate stance. ![]() Behaviorism has a reputation for being fairly sterile and cut and dried. And so she thought well, maybe there’s something to this humanistic approach. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, behaviorism was popular but also the humanistic approaches were also dominating at the time. But what she found was not only it wasn’t enough but oftentimes it was extremely aversive to the patient and they would quit treatment and they would get angry. And she would try to, as she says, cure them with behavioral therapy. Her research team would call the hospitals in the area and ask them to send her the most severely suicidal and self-injuring populations and they would do so. In the ‘70s when Linehan first started working with suicidal individuals, she tells about how it was easier to get grant money because she was the only one who was doing randomized controlled trials with suicidal individuals. And so it’s no longer associated just with borderline personality disorder in women. Women are the primary gender in which DBT has been supported with but there has also been some evidence that it’s helpful with both genders. And it’s also been supported with not just adults but with adolescents. There is less evidence supporting anorexia.įrequency rate and length of hospitalization have been shown to decrease repeatedly in different studies that have been conducted on DBT. In fact, it’s been empirically validated for a variety of different populations and issues including substance use disorders, suicide attempts, PTSD, self-harm, symptoms of depression and anxiety, eating disorders, that’s including binge eating and bulimic tendencies. ![]() ![]() Linehan found that there was support for the use of dialectical behavior therapy with borderline personality disorder but today it’s almost a faux pas to suggest that DBT is only used to treat borderline personality disorder. DBT is well known for treating borderline personality disorder. She actually did not know anything about borderline personality disorder but came to find out about later. I am an Affiliate Professor of Vanderbilt Psychiatry and an Associate Professor of Vanderbilt Counseling Program.ĭBT was originally founded in the late 1970s by Marsha Linehan who was a suicide researcher at the time. I founded and continue to run the Vanderbilt University’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy Peer Consult Team and serve as a consultant to a variety of hospitals and schools. I am a Dialectical Behavior Therapy–Linehan Board Certified Clinician and I own a private practice in Nashville in which we conduct DBT as much as possible to fidelity on adolescents, adults and families in addition to other cognitive behavioral therapies. My name is Stephanie Vaughn and I’m a Clinical Psychologist in Nashville, Tennessee. ![]() DBT balances CBT and humanism with dialectics.DBT is not just for severe populations.DBT was the first psychotherapy to formally incorporate mindfulness.Linehan had personal experience with mental illness. DBT was developed in the 1970’s by Dr.This presentation is an excerpt from the online course “DBT in Practice: Mastering the Essentials”.
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