Mindfulness and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Application with Depressed Older Adults with Personality Disorders
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive treatment intervention that integrates behavior therapy and validation strategies. It is developed for the treatment of suicidal behavior and borderline personality disorder. This chapter outlines factors associated with the use of mindfulness from a DBT perspective including a theoretical and conceptual rationale, hypothesized mechanisms of change, and practical issues associated with implementing mindfulness in DBT. It also describes the application of DBT mindfulness skills in a depressed older adult with comorbid personality disorders. Mindfulness is a quality of awareness that is conceptualized in DBT as a behavior and distilled into specific and discrete skills. The ultimate goals of DBT mindfulness skills are to allow individuals to achieve a "wise" integration of emotional and rational thinking, increase conscious control over attentional processes, and experience a sense of unity or oneness with themselves, others, and the universe. DBT is unique from other mindfulness approaches in that it is designed to be used with emotionally dysregulated patients. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
