Residential Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, Part 1: Accelerating the Treatment of Personality Disorders

Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) delivered in an individual therapy (vs. group) format has proved to be an effective treatment option for a broad range of patients with treatment-resistant mental health conditions. A novel residential program based on ISTDP was designed for patients whose personality disorders were treatment resistant (N=155), meaning that patients did not benefit from outpatient psychotherapy. The authors proposed that a specific treatment approach-residential ISTDP-can be a treatment option for patients with personality disorders. This article describes the ideas and characteristic features of how ISTDP was integrated within an innovative residential treatment program to accelerate change processes and reduce health care consumption.