The ADDRESS® Course for Working With Personality Disorder

Executive Summary:

Personality Disorder causes distress both to the individual concerned and those around them, yet is so poorly understood even by professionals that the term 'Personality Disorder' is sometimes used as little more than a term of abuse for patients who have consistently frustrated those who are trying to help them.

The ADDRESS® Course is designed to provide delegates with (a) a proper understanding of personality disorder and (b) professional and effective ways of responding to the most difficult behaviours that people with personality disorder produce, and (c) a clear and systematic sequence of steps to consistently deliver successful treatment interventions.

Who should attend:

All professionals who work with people diagnosed as 'personality disordered', including 'borderline personality disorder' whether in community, inpatient or secure settings.

Course Aims:

• The concept of personality and personality disorder.

• How can you tell this person is suffering from a personality disorder? Forming a conceptualisation: what lies behind the problem, what is maintaining it and, therefore, what can be done about it?

First Aid:

• Effective strategies for responding to common problematic behaviours from people diagnosed as personality disordered, including 'attention seeking', threats to harm themselves, 'blackmail', and others.

Understanding and treatment interventions:

• Understanding what happens in the different parts of the brain: why people repeatedly act against their own interests and as 'their own worst enemy'.

• Generating insight in the person that certain aspects of what they do and/or the way they see things is causing problems. Raising their own observations to the status of knowledge - to motivate change.

• Planning a better strategy for the person to respond to the situations that cause problems for them or others.

• How to support the person in implementing the plan. How to help the person sustain the progress they achieve by developing and implementing a maintenance plan.

• Building and maintaining the relationship: relationship dangers, relation-fractures and repairs thereof.

• Validation and validation+ - key interventions that many professionals omit, and yet are essential for effective intervention.

• Nurturing of the person's self-efficacy, fostering the idea that the person can succeed in changing even after successive failures.

• The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. That is, in the case of personality disorder, that the person keeps making the same mistakes, or, when they do something well, refrain from repeating it. We must be able to facilitate the person'slearning from their experiences - both good and bad.

• The square peg in the square hole: effective manipulations of both the social and physical environments that can short-circuit years of individual therapy.

• The principal biological factors that can transform a person, both for better and for worse. What they are, how they affect the deepest levels of the brain, and how to motivate patients to work on them.

• Evidence-based practice and the importance of monitoring success in treatment: obtaining data and analysing it.

• Supporting yourself: for your own good and the good of those you work with.

• Case studies: prepared studies to analyse and 'solve'; applying ADDRESS® to your own current cases.

What this course will do for you:

• It will provide you with a proper understanding of – and maybe even empathy with - personality disorder.

• You will know how to manage all the most difficult and common challenges that people with personality disorder present.

• You will have a clear and systematic sequence of steps to consistently deliver successful interventions.

• It will equip you with skills that are essential to working with personality disorder, many of which can be transferred to other areas of your professional and personal life.

What you receive as a result of attending the training:

You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT's Level 1 accreditation, and receive a certificate to this effect. The accreditation gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT accreditation to Level 2.

Your registration lasts indefinitely, and your accreditation lasts for 3 years and is renewable by sitting an online refresher which also upgrades your accreditation to APT Level 2 if you are successful in the associated online exam.

Your accreditation is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training.