Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a psychosocial treatment originally developed in the 1980s to treat highly suicidal women. As suicidal behavior often occurs in clients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), many studies tested DBT’s efficacy for treating BPD, demonstrating promising results. The objective of this chapter is to describe how DBT can be an effective tool for the treatment of severe and complex cases in which emotion dysregulation leads individuals to maladaptive behaviors. Comprehensive, integrative, and result-based, DBT has currently aroused great interest among psychotherapists around the world and slowly grown to be the main evidence-based psychological treatment for BPD.