Introduction to Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for Borderline Personality Disorder

This course covers the origins of the treatment and its theoretical underpinnings, together with an overview of the core components of the treatment. This includes skills training, individual therapy, phone coaching and consultation teams.

This course provides an introduction to Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

This course covers the origins of the treatment and its theoretical underpinnings, together with an overview of the core components of the treatment. This includes skills training, individual therapy, phone coaching and consultation teams.

Who should register? This course is best suited to social workers and/or allied health professionals specialising in (or interested in specialising in) mental health practice.

Learning Outcomes

This introductory course will enable participants to:

• Gain knowledge about the development of DBT and the biosocial theory of DBT
• Understand the diagnostic criteria for BPD and how this maps onto the skills taught in DBT
• Understand the primary treatment targets of DBT
• Understand the role of different components of treatment in DBT (skills training, individual therapy, phone coaching and therapist consultation)
• Understand the aims of each of the four skills modules of mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness.

AASW Credentials: Mental Health (Focussed Psychological Strategies); Clinical

Presenter

Dr Carla Walton is Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Centre for Psychotherapy, a specialist service for BPD and Eating Disorders within Hunter New England Mental Health Service in Australia. She has been involved in treatment provision to persons with BPD using DBT, in Australia's public and private sectors for the past 15 years. She provides training and consultation in BPD and DBT throughout public and private sector services across Australia, and has been involved in helping set up treatment programs in many public mental health services across New South Wales.

Dr Walton initiated and co-wrote the Guidelines for the Management and Treatment of BPD for the Sydney South West Area Health Service, which has since been taken up by a number of mental health services across NSW and other states.

Dr Walton is the principal investigator on a large-scale randomised clinical trial of DBT and a psychodynamic therapy (the Conversational Model) and other research studies of DBT. She is a member of Professor Marsha Linehan’s annual DBT Strategic Planning Meeting at the University of Washington, holds a conjoint lectureship with the University of Newcastle and currently supervises a number of postgraduate research projects in the area of Personality Disorders. Her main research interests lie in the fields of BPD and translational research.