Effective management of patients with borderline personality disorder in a busy acute inpatient ward using dialectical behaviour therapy principles.

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to highlight principles of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) that can provide a framework in the management of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and outline some guiding principles in the effective management of these patients on a busy acute inpatient ward. CONCLUSIONS: The inpatient environment is often a place where invalidating experiences can occur. These include feeling ignored, misunderstood and where private experiences are trivialised or denied. Patients with BPD are extremely sensitive to these experiences and are likely to decompensate if strategies are not in place to facilitate a more validating experience during admission. The proposed guidelines are feasible to implement and support a cohesive treatment team and collaborative patient-centred care which is likely to improve patient outcomes.

Adapting evidence-based group therapies following COVID-19 restrictions.

AIM: The COVID-19 pandemic has created barriers to the running of group therapies due to the need to maintain social distance. This paper aims to describe modifications of existing therapeutic groups delivered to people diagnosed with serious and enduring mental illnesses (SMIs) to enable the therapies to continue in an online format due to the COVID-19 restrictions. CONCLUSIONS: Therapists and consumers were motivated to find a way to continue the therapies described despite the context of the restrictions imposed due to COVID-19. This paper describes what was involved in 'pivoting' to a new mode of practice and modifications that were required over time and as new regulations were put in place. Formal research is required to establish an evidence base if these therapies were required to be regularly delivered in an online mode.