Today, July 6th, is the opening day of the 2015 National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) National Convention in San Francisco, California.
At 11 AM (PST) Dr. Marsha Linehan will be giving a keynote presentation on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and the development of her groundbreaking Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which revolutionized the treatment of people diagnosed with BPD, a mental health condition long thought to be untreatable. A number of research studies have shown that DBT is highly effective in reducing self-harming behaviors and suicide attempts in people with BPD.
Dr. Linehan’s talk is titled “Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Where We Were, Where We Are and Where We Are Going”
In an interview conducted with Dr. Linehan for the series “If Only We Had Known, A Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder”, she provided an overview of what DBT does.
Dr. Linehan describes BPD as a pervasive disorder of the emotion regulation system and believes the perplexing and self-harming behaviors associated with BPD serve a misguided purpose- to help regulate a person’s out of control emotions.
Dr. Linehan’s solution to the core problem was the development of DBT. In her presentation, she will describe the evolution of DBT over the past 35 years and how DBT can be modified for adolescent patients as well as adults.
For those unable to attend the Convention you can read Dr. Linehan’s accompanying PowerPoint presentation courtesy of NAMI.
