Personality-Disordered Patients

Determining the amenability of personality disorders to
psychotherapy-a patient's capacity to benefit from verbal approaches to
treatment-is important in helping clinicians determine the treatability of
cases. Michael Stone here shares the factors he has observed over long years
of practice that can help practitioners evaluate patients, stressing the
amenability of the various disorders to amelioration. By focusing on which
patients are likely to respond well to therapeutic intervention and which
will prove most resistive, his book will help therapists determine with what
kinds of patients they will most likely succeed and with which ones failure
is almost a certainty.

Stone establishes the attributes that affect
this amenability-such as the capacity for self-reflection, motivation, and
life circumstances-as guidelines for evaluating patients, then describes
borderline and other personality-disordered patients with varying levels of
amenability, from high to low. This coverage progresses from patients
belonging to the DSM "anxious cluster," along with the
depressive-masochistic character and the hysteric character, to patients who
demonstrate an intermediate level of amenability to psychotherapy. He
introduces the interrelationship between borderline personality disorder and
dissociative disorders and discusses treatability among certain patients in
Clusters "A" and "C," as well as others with narcissistic, histrionic,
depressive disorders. Final chapters address the most severe aberrations of
personality and the limitations they impose on the efficacy of therapy.
Personality-Disordered Patients is filled with practical,
clinically focused information. This guideline structured book:


* Covers all personality disorders-including ones not addressed in the
latest DSM such as sadistic, depressive, hypomanic, and
irritable-explosive
* Identifies both attributes necessary for
treatability and factors associated with low treatability
* Pays
particular attention to borderline disorders, which represent the most
discussed conditions and are among the most challenging to
psychotherapists
* Reviews personality traits whose presence, if
intense-even if unaccompanied by a definable personality disorder-creates
severe problems for psychotherapy

Numerous case studies throughout
the book provide examples that will help therapists determine which of their
own patients are most likely to benefit from their efforts and thereby
establish their own limits of effectiveness. By alerting practitioners to
when therapy is likely to fail, these guidelines can help them avoid the
professional disappointment of being unable to reach the most intractable
patients.