Dialectical behavior therapy in a case of borderline personality disorder traits and eating disorder

Abstract

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is heterogeneous in its clinical manifestations: from patients with marked traits of BPD to those that meet full criteria and/or with an important severity and impairment. In adolescents, a lower grade of severity may indicate a developing BPD in which case an early intervention may arrest a further development of the disorder. The psychological treatment program for BPD with the greater amount of empirical evidence is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) (,b), originally created by Linehan (1993) to treat severe BPD. The aim of this study is to describe the application of DBT in a young woman diagnosed with bulimia nervosa and marked traits of BPD. The good preliminary results of this study indicate that DBT could be efficacious and produce significant improvement in this type of patients.