Speaker(s):
Presentation: Dialectical Behavior Therapy has been proven to be a treatment of choice for clients with severe emotional dysregulation problems. However, for clients who also have intellectual disabilities, the treatment is not always as successful. Julie F. Brown, MSW, PhD, Director of Program Development at The Justice Resource Institute’s Integrated Clinical Services in Rhode Island, developed a DBT-Informed Skills System that addresses difficulties intellectually disabled clients face. She recognized that intellectually disabled clients “require an adequate, synthesized framework or system to teach skills to clients in a form that they can understand, apply, and generalize.” Dr. Brown developed The Skills System over the course of many years of working with her own clients and providing comprehensive DBT. Three key elements were integrated: (1) the work of James Gross, PhD., in emotion regulation; (2) cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2010); and (3) ongoing collaboration with her own clients. Ms. Brown ended up with a Skills System framework that helps clients know which skill to choose and how many skills to implement given his or her level of emotion in each situation. This presentation will highlight some of the main differences of the skills and the System tools that Julie Brown carefully and effectively developed. The participants will hear how cognitively-challenged clients in a residential psychiatric hospital setting who had previously been treated using traditional, comprehensive DBT encountered and reacted to the new DBT-Informed Skills System. The lessons learned from implementing the model will also be shared along with data highlighting important areas of change for the clients.
Objectives:
- Review some of the fundamental knowledge of behavioral health and disability.
- This training describes in a nutshell established approaches of DBT and the new treatment of DBT-informed therapy for cognitively challenged clients.
- Provide an overview of the Skills system in order for learners to see if this treatment approach would work for their population.
- Describe how complex emotion regulation challenges are broken down into manageable problems using a series of steps that people at many different skill levels can apply.