Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

To supplement my post about borderline personality disorder (BPD), I'll comment on a highly effective therapy developed especially for BPD. I, myself, have been through DBT and can attest to its wonderful results. DBT is a modified form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on addressing cognitive distortions (thoughts that assume negative reasons for a potentially neutral situation) and practicing changing the way you think about the situation. DBT focuses on accepting the way you think, but changing the way you react to the thoughts. 

Clinical Mental Health Diagnosis - Psychological Assessment

In my post about the biological assessment of mental health diagnosis, I mentioned that there are three ways a clinician can focus a mental health assessment: biological, psychodynamic, and behavioral. In this post I will discuss the psychodynamic and behavioral assessments of patients. 

I'm not sure what a psychological assessment feels like to the clinician, but I have been through several assessments as a patient. Some of them have been very grueling and embarrassing - my 2 hour long assessment for dialectical behavioral therapy comes to mind. Generally, the mental health worker will ask a series of questions to determine personality (am I maladaptive?), social context (am I from an abusive family? caring for an sick family member? a bullied teen?), and culture (I'm a WASC) .

Clinical Mental Health Diagnosis - Biological Assessment

One of the most difficult tasks for mental health workers is to clinically assess and diagnose mental illnesses - especially when comorbidity (having more than one mental illness) is so common. It usually begins with a psychological assessment through tests, observation, and interviews so the clinician can catalog the symptoms. Then the DSM-5 is consulted to give the diagnosis. 

A clinician may focus the assessment in three ways - biological, psychodynamic, and behaviorally. 

Frontline: New Asylums

New Asylums (2005) is a Frontline documentary that delves into the problem of housing the mentally ill in prison systems. Believe it or not, the world's three largest asylums for mentally ill are the Cook County Jail in Chicago, the Twin Towers of the Los Angeles County Jail, and Riker's Island in New York. This problem has been escalating ever since the mid 1900's when deinstitutionalization of mentally ill and intellectually challenged became a popular movement to encourage "humane" treatment of mentally ill and to reduce state expenditures on medical care.