Commentary on innovations in dialectical behavior therapy

The articles in this series on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) have each identified a population of patients for whom emotion dysregulation appears to be functionally related to their presenting problems. Each paper describes how the original (and now standard) form of DBT might be modified to better fit patients with problems and/or diagnostic disorders differing from the suicidal, borderline adult women treated in the first randomized trial of DBT. Each application is designed to treat individuals with personality disorders but with varying presenting problems. The principal differences among the various applications are in the specification of additional behavioral targets to address the differing presenting problems in each population of patients. The rapid increase in new applications of DBT as exemplified in the articles presented here is exciting and suggests a value of principal driven treatment manuals.