8:15 Registration open
9:00 Lise Laporte, PhD - Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:10 Dr. Ronald Fraser - Personality Disorders: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
9:30 Dr. Lois Choi-Kain - Interpersonal Hypersensitivity and GPM principles
10:30 Health break
10:45 Dr. Lois Choi-Kain - Getting Started
12:00 Lunch break
1:00 Dr. Lois Choi-Kain - Managing Safety
2:30 Health break
2:45 Dr. Lois Choi-Kain - Comorbidity and Multimodal Treatments
4:00 Dr. Joel Paris - Closing remarks
"If a tree falls on you in the forest, does it have a PD?": An arboreal icebreaker with Dr. Ronald Fraser.
Dr. Lois Choi-Kain will first provide background information, including on the status of GPM, the prevalence of BPD in various settings and the lack of treatment availability for patients seeking care, the resource-intensiveness of other evidence-based treatments for BPD compared to GPM, and certification requirements in different treatment modalities. She will aslo speak about the myths concerning treating BPD and the emergence of GPM.
In the Interpersonal Hypersensitivity section, the theory behind GPM will be laid out, explaining how symptoms of the disorder are conceptualized as responses to feeling connected, threatened, alone and despairing. She will also explain the implications of this theory for treatment.
In the GPM Principles section, the stance of a GPM clinician will be explained. Clinicians are encouraged to be active instead of reactive, supportive and validating, and real and professional. Clinicians are taught to focus on patients' life situations (eg., getting a job), to expect change, and to keep patients accountable. This talk emphasizes psychoeducation, relational issues, pragmatism, and nonspecific factors, and also addresses the medicalization of the disorder.
The Getting Started section goes over GPM’s phases of therapy, the therapeutic approach, alliance building, and goal setting.
The Managing Safety section provides basic guidelines on helping patients stay safe, including avoiding hospitalization when possible, developing safety plans, clarifying precipitants, and so on.
The Comorbidity section covers which disorders should be treated before BPD treatment can begin, and which should be secondary to BPD. the Multimodal Treatments section outlines the advantages and rules of split treatments, the benefits of group therapies, and the importance of family involvement and providing the family with guidelines on how to help their loved one. This section will also address the challenges of implementation.
