Description
Objectives
1. Define borderline personality disorder (BPD) as a psychiatric illness.
2. Understand the psychodynamic mechanisms underlying BPD, including problems in the individual’s sense of self and other.
3. Identify key defense mechanisms in BPD, such as splitting, projection, and projective identification.
4. Understand how these mechanisms play out in interpersonal relationships, including the treatment relationship.
5. Provide strategies for the theoretically-informed and compassionate treatment of patients with BPD.
Description:
Borderline Personality Disorder is considered a severe and persistent mental disorder, marked by a pattern of intense and unstable relationships, unstable self-image, fear of abandonment, impulsive and often dangerous behaviours. The economic costs of BPD are thought to be twice that of major depression. The BPD individual can be difficult to live with and is considered by many to be difficult to treat. In this webinar, BPD expert, Dr. Mark Ruffalo will help practitioners to: define BPD; understand the psychodynamic mechanisms underlying BPD; identify key defence mechanisms, such as splitting, projection and projective identification; understand how these mechanisms play out in interpersonal relationships, including the treatment relationship; and importantly, provide strategies for the compassionate treatment of patients with BPD.
Who Should Attend?:
• Nurses, Physicians, Psychologists, Mental Health Nurses, Therapists in all settings
• Primary Care Nurses and Physicians; MH Staff in Community Settings
• Social Workers & Allied Professional Staff in Mental Health and Addictions Settings settings
• Intake & Frontline Staff; Mental Health Managers and Educators
• Mental Health Nurses and Staff in Adolescent, Correctional & Forensic Settings
Mark L. Ruffalo, MSW, DPsa
Mark L. Ruffalo, M.S.W., D.Psa., is a psychotherapist in private practice in Tampa, FL, and serves as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. He has experience in the psychodynamic treatment of a range of psychiatric conditions with particular interest in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.
During his training at the University of Pittsburgh, Mark had the opportunity to work with severely ill patients in long-term psychotherapy, an area in which he has developed recognized expertise. He has published previously in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. He currently serves as Co-Director of the Psychotherapy Track at the UCF/HCA Orlando psychiatry residency program and is Founding Editor of The Carlat Psychotherapy Report.
His current research interests include the object relations theory of borderline personality disorder; communication dilemmas, paradoxes, and double binds in personality pathology; and deficits in logical reasoning in psychotic and borderline states. He has advanced the hypothesis that borderline personality disorder is fundamentally a disorder of paradox or self-contradiction.
