Allowing the Experience to Happen: Why Mindfulness May Be the Key Component For Successful Treatments of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Comorbid Substance Use Disorders (SUDs)

Author

Cameron M. West, Bard CollegeFollow

Date of Submission

Fall 2014

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Though treatment is difficult and rarely successful for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and comorbid Substance Use Disorders (SUDs), innovative research in both Axis I and Axis II disorders is showing that mindfulness may be a crucial component for not only lowering suicide rates but for curing BPD entirely (Gregory & Remen, 2008; Linehan & Dexter-Mazza, 2008; Masuda, Mandavia & Tully, 2013; Owens, Walter, Chard & Davis, 2012). For patients with difficult-to-treat comorbid BPD and SUDs, treatments like Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Dynamic Deconstructive Psychotherapy (DDP) that use mindfulness have shown much empirical promise (Gregory & Remen, 2008; Linehan & Dexter-Mazza, 2008). The proposed study will randomly assign participants with comorbid BPD and SUDs to three conditions of eight week self-focus treatment programs: Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, rumination, and a novel treatment where participants will write about memories invoked from pictures (“pictures” condition). I predict that those in the mindfulness condition will show improvements in mindfulness, reductions in parasuicide behavior, and reductions in addiction severity compared to the beginning of treatment. I predict that there will be no change for the rumination and “pictures” conditions in these areas at the end of treatment compared to the beginning of treatment. If successful, this study will begin to show that mindfulness is the mechanism by which therapies like DBT and DDP are effective in treating patients with comorbid BPD and SUDs.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

West, Cameron M., "Allowing the Experience to Happen: Why Mindfulness May Be the Key Component For Successful Treatments of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Comorbid Substance Use Disorders (SUDs)" (2014). Senior Projects Fall 2014. 45.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2014/45