Creative coping: A cognitive-behavioral group for borderline personality disorder

Abstract

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) pose major therapeutic challenges to mental health professionals. Effective and practical treatment of the patient with BPD is needed in short-term inpatient settings, and psychiatric nurses are in a unique position to implement innovative treatment strategies for the borderllne patient. The Creative Coping Group is a practice model designed by psychiatric nurses for patients with BPD, using a cognitive-behavioral f'ramework. It is a group therapy intervention based on Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) that addresses the ineffective coping of patients with BPD that results in chronic suicidal behavior. Linehan's framework focuses on deficits in emotional control, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance. The objective of the group sessions is to foster insight and awareness into symptoms, feelings, and behaviors through psychoeducation, group exercises, discussion, and homework assignments.

Multiple meanings of self harm: A critical review

“…In practice, a person with this diagnosis is often judged harshly, feared, constructed as chronic and likely not to change ( Johnstone 1997 ). Typical attitudes towards the person with BPD are perjorative and actions tend to be managed with behavioural techniques rather than the person's reasoning and compulsions understood ( Haswell & Graham 1996 ; Miller 1994 ; Tantam & Whittaker 1992 ). However, when self harm is no longer convincingly linked to the diagnosis of BPD, then such management practices become difficult to defend.…”

Exploring Registered Psychiatric Nurses' Responses towards Service Users with a Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder

“…According to the participants in one study [20], health care providers held preconceived and unfavourable opinions of people with BPD, and they referred to their experience as been labelled, not diagnosed [20]. Some service users have spoken about being terrified of disapproval or rejection, particularly from key professionals such as their therapist, and frequently withheld information to defend against this [19]. This sense of being judged negatively by professionals is also reported elsewhere [18].…”

Brief psychoeducation for people with personality disorder: A pilot study

“…Those that have been reported in the literature tend to attempt more than just communicating diagnosis. Examples include skills training based on a model of deficit compensation (Stanley, Bundy, & Beberman, 2001), group treatment to improve coping skills using psychoeducation to improve insight and awareness (Miller, Eisner, & Allport, 1994), and a one‐to‐one approach that focused on the individual's personality difficulties with acknowledgement that these persist and often differ (through being egosyntonic) from other mental states (Tyrer, 1998).…”