Evaluation of a Modified Dialectical Behavior Therapy Program

The goal of this pilot project is to offer outpatient Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) treatment as described in Linehan\'s text (1993), which is considered an effective treatment of borderline personality disorder. This treatment consists of weekly individual psychotherapy, weekly group skills training, 24 hour telephone consultation, and weekly team consultation meetings for therapists. The investigators program is able to offer all of these components except the 24 hour phone consultation (which has been modified due to employment/union guidelines of interdisciplinary staff working within the investigators health care system). This project intends to offer the treatment for a period of 6 months. As such, this proposed research project seeks to assess the feasibility of implementing an outpatient DBT program within a public health care setting in Canada. This study also aims to evaluate this DBT program for clinical effectiveness in its modified format. Specifically, the investigators will examine relevant outcomes related to patient functioning (e.g., depression, self-harm and suicidal behaviors, and admissions to hospital/ER visits) and improvement (e.g., improved quality of life, meeting work/employment goals) pre and post completion of this 6 month treatment program. The investigators hypotheses are that each patient will show improvement in all outcome variables (e.g., improved mood and quality of life, decreased self-harm, decreased ER visits and hospitalization visits, etc). The investigators also hypothesize that the investigators modified program will produce comparable results to those from studies of standard outpatient DBT.