Schema Therapy with Emotionally Inhibited and Fearful Patients

Brief individual experiential schema therapy in adult outpatients with cluster C personality disorders: Does it work?

This study investigated the effectiveness of brief individual experiential schema therapy (ST) in 12 adult outpatients with cluster C personality disorders (PD) using randomised multiple baseline design. Waitlist period was followed by five explorative sessions, 18 experiential ST sessions, two treatment follow-up (FU) booster sessions and a 6-month FU assessment. Overall well-being (ORS), behavioural treatment goals and negative core beliefs were assessed 60-91 times, global symptomatic distress (BSI) six times. PD severity (SCID-5-PD) was pre-post-analysed. Randomisation and non-parametric tests showed large significant effects (d = 1.08-2.38, r = .53-.66) on all outcomes at treatment-FU and 6-month FU assessment. This is the first study providing preliminary evidence of effectiveness of brief individual experiential ST for patients with cluster C PD, tentatively challenging the common tenet that long treatment duration is required. Due to limitations, replication is recommended.

Agency in avoidant personality disorder: a narrative review

Objectives

Avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) is a highly prevalent personality disorder, especially in clinical settings, yet scarcely researched. People diagnosed with AvPD have severe impairments in functioning and suffer greatly, yet we still lack meta-analytic evidence for therapy and only a few RCTs are conducted. Patient factors are the most important for outcome in therapy, in general. Lack of agency might be a core deficit in people diagnosed with AvPD. Their conditions might be improved if we understand their agency better. We review previous research regarding psychological mechanisms and interpersonal relationships that facilitate or hinder agency in AvPD in daily life and psychotherapy.

Methods

Summarizing original literature in a narrative review with reflexive thematic analysis.

Results

People diagnosed with AvPD seem to have significant impairments in their sense of agency due to a lack of emotional awareness, an overweight of inhibiting vs. activating emotions, and difficulties regulating emotions. Difficulties also seem related to high levels of attachment avoidance and fear, creating strong ambivalence in social needs, in addition to a strong tendency to subordinate to others. A weak sense of self with a poor narrative, self-doubt, and harsh self-critique makes a reflexive and intentional stand increasingly difficult for these people.

Conclusion

This review gives a clinically meaningful understanding of core strengths and deficits in the personality functioning of AvPD that can help clinicians map out important therapeutic work, identify barriers to client-agency in therapy, and work through relational difficulties in the therapeutic alliance.

The ICD-11 classification of personality disorders: a European perspective on challenges and opportunities

The 11th revision of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) includes a fundamentally new approach to Personality Disorders (PD). ICD-11 is expected to be implemented first in European countries before other WHO member states. The present paper provides an overview of this new ICD-11 model including PD severity classification, trait domain specifiers, and the additional borderline pattern specifier. We discuss the perceived challenges and opportunities of using the ICD-11 approach with particular focus on its continuity and discontinuity with familiar PD categories such as avoidant PD and narcissistic PD. The advent of the ICD-11 PD classification involves major changes for health care workers, researchers, administrators, and service providers as well as patients and families involved. The anticipated challenges and opportunities are put forward in terms of specific unanswered questions. It is our hope that these questions will stimulate further research and discussion among researchers and clinicians in the coming years.

Transdiagnostic conceptualization of social avoidance through the lens of personality functioning and traits

This commentary seeks to highlight how social avoidance is portrayed in the six presented case-reports from the perspective of self- and interpersonal functioning as well as stylistic trait features of negative affectivity (e.g., anxiousness and shame) and detachment (e.g., social withdrawal and emotional restriction). This approach to avoidance and social isolation will subsequently be generalized to a range of mental disorders where such features play a significant role. We propose that self and interpersonal functioning along with traits of negative affectivity and detachment may serve as a transdiagnostic framework for describing features of avoidance and social isolation across different treatment models, traditions, and disorders. We specifically assume that future developments of the promising treatment approaches presented in the current collection of case reports may benefit from such a "shared" framework for conceptualizing and treating self- and interpersonal problems related to avoidance and social isolation.