Workshops

The ICD-11 Classification of Personality Disorders

Speaker: Bo Sayyad Bach 

Psychiatric Research Unit
Center for Personality Disorder Research (CPDR)
Mental Health Services
Region Zealand
Denmark

This workshop will provide an introduction to the ICD-11 personality disorder classification. The rationale of using a common dimension of personality functioning (i.e., mild, moderate, severe) will be presented, and the underlying principles of using trait domain qualifiers (i.e., negative affectivity, detachment, dissociality, disinhibition, and anankastia) will be elucidated. The workshop will also dive into more details about the ICD-11 diagnostic guidelines for personality disorders using clinical examples. The specific core capacities of personality functioning will be elucidated, and the clinical information derived from trait domain combinations will be demonstrated. Participants will also be given the opportunity to try out the classification of personality disorder severity and individual trait expressions based on a case vignette.

Management of self-harm in young people

Speakers: Lars Mehlum MD PhD and Anita Tørmoen PhD

National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention
Institute of Clinical Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
University of Oslo
Norway

Suicidal and self-harming behavior - highly prevalent in adolescents and a strong risk factor for long-lasting psychiatric morbidity and completed suicide – is often experienced as particularly challenging and risky to treat by many clinicians. A large proportion of self-harming and suicidal teenagers receive little or no treatment, and among those adolescents who have indeed been referred to specialized care, many drop out prematurely because of their treatment interfering behaviors or lack of support from families or clinical services. Despite these challenges, several effective approaches to treat suicidal teenagers have been developed in recent years; interventions that are accessible and acceptable to the teens and their families, as well as feasible to deliver in community mental health settings. In this workshop, we will briefly review some of these treatments and their research base and then present strategies that seem to be important components in effective interventions aiming at reducing the risk of suicidal behavior in this patient population. Participants will learn how to distinguish between suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm, how to engage adolescents in the treatment, how to make a collaborative plan for safe treatment, how to apply skills training to reduce self-harm, and how to manage suicidal crises.

Treatment research and development with suicidal and self-harming adolescents and their families remains a complex and demanding task, however, a lot of progress has been made over recent years that gives reason for treatment optimism provided we are able to use the new knowledge in routine clinical practice in the many contexts self-harming adolescents are encountered.

How to Target PTSD in Clients with Borderline Personality Disorder?
A crisp Introduction in DBT-PTSD

Speaker: Martin Bohus

Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH)
Mannheim
Heidelberg University
Germany

DBT-PTSD is a modular program, developed by M. Bohus, in close cooperation with M. Linehan. It is specifically tailored to treat complex PTSD related to childhood abuse in clients with BPD.

Complex PTSD is characterized by dysfunctional memory processing (e.g. intrusions and flashbacks), severe problems in affect regulation (e.g. intense and maladaptive emotions), negative self-concept (e.g. guilt, shame, and self-hate), problems in social interaction (e.g. mistrust, alienation) and complex dysfunctional behavioral patterns like self-harm, suicide attempts or aggressive outbursts. To target these core domains, DBT-PTSD merges evidence-based therapeutic strategies: principles and skills of DBT, trauma-specific cognitive and exposure-based techniques, compassion focused interventions, and behavior change procedures.

The treatment program is designed to be delivered under both conditions: outpatient (45 weeks) or residential (three-months). Data from two large RCTs reveal large effect sizes in all relevant domains (g=1.4) as well as significant superiority of DBT-PTSD to Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). Accordingly, DBT-PTSD has currently the best scientific evidence for effective treatment of complex PTSD.

This DBT-PTSD course aims to give a crisp introduction into this program.

At the conclusion of this seminar you’ll be able to:

• Understand the basic psychosocial principles of complex PTSD
• Understand the principles, structure and interventions of DBT-PTSD
• Reorganize your understanding of the role of PTSD in BPD
• Decide to choose a comprehensive 4-days online training in DBT-PTSD in the future

Quantitative methods – students/trainees