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Dialectical behavior therapy. By Michaela A. Swales and Heidi L. Heard, 167 pp, ISBN 978-0-415-44458-3, New York, Routledge, 2009.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy is the seventh book in "The CBT Distinctive Features" book series edited by Wendy Dryden. Other CBT approaches covered in this series include behavioral activation, Beck's cognitive theory, constructivist psychotherapy, metacognitive therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and rational-emotive behavior therapy. Forthcoming titles will cover acceptance and commitment therapy, schema therapy, and compassion-focused therapy. This exciting new series invites the leading practitioners and theorists of the main CBT therapies to highlight 30 distinctive features-practical and theoretical~of their particular CBT approach in accessible, simple, and brief texts.
This little gem of a book is no exception. Michaela Swales is a lecturer-practitioner in clinical psychology at Bangor University and a consultant clinical psychologist in the North Wales Adolescent Service of the National Health Service Trust in the UK. She is the Director of the British Isles DBT Training Team. Her coauthor is Heidi Heard, a senior trainer and international consultant for BehavioralTech in the USA, which is the organization founded by Marsha Linehan, the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Both authors are therefore uniquely qualified for the task of distilling the 30 distinctive features of a complex and multifaceted treatment like DBT.
In recent years, DBT has become the leading psychotherapeutic approach designed particularly to treat the problems of chronically suicidal individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). It was the first psychotherapy to show effectiveness in treating BPD in controlled clinical trials, and while it is no longer the only therapy to have shown effectiveness in controlled trials (e.g., Bateman & Fonagy, 2001), it has currently the largest evidence base with several randomized controlled trials to support its effectiveness (Clarkin, Levy, Lenzenweger, & Kernberg, 2007; Koons, Robins, Tweed, Lunch, et al., 2001; Linehan, Armstrong, Suarez, Allman, & Heard, 1991; Linehan, Tutek, Heard, & Armstrong, 1994; Verheul, Van Den Bosch, Koeter, De Ridder, et al., 2003).
Perhaps part of the DBT success is the fact that, like most CBT approaches, DBT can be taught to clinicians across a variety of...