SC30 – Brief Treatment with the Borderline Personality
Location: Regency Ballroom
Brief treatment with the Borderline Personality presents substantial challenges. Features common to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often make the therapy process chaotic and unproductive. This approach focuses treatment on each specific issue as a single episode of care, which allows for a success experience for the patient. Brief Treatment with the BPD patient makes no pretense at wholesale personality reconstruction, but rather considers the impact of the disorder on the therapy process in order to enhance the probability of success in successive brief episodes of care. This workshop reviews the etiology of BPD from both the Object Relations and the Psycho-social viewpoints. The value of understanding the resultant symptoms, from the standpoint of the patient’s phenomenology, is discussed as a context for managing the therapeutic relationship. Specific boundaries and development of a solution-focused plan are essential to the management of the therapy process, and are addressed in this workshop. Brief Treatment with the BPD population requires that the patient has both a safety plan, and an established community network to meet emergent needs. Development of a safety plan and a community network are therefore also addressed in this workshop. Specific protocols for dealing with issues such as Self-injurious behavior and Suicidal Ideation are reviewed.
Educational Objectives:
- Describe BPD specific treatment issues.
- Describe protocols to guide in the process of managing specific treatment issues.
- Utilize a model to transition long term BPD patients to brief solution focused episodes of care.