Changes in mentalization in patients with personality disorders during sequential brief-Adlerian psychodynamic psychotherapy: The role of therapists' technique and countertransference.

Unlabelled: Mentalization, that is the capacity to understand our and others' behaviors in terms of intentional mental states, represents one of the core features of personality disorders (PDs) and can be related to therapists' countertransference (CT) and interventions.

Aims: The aim of the present work was to study the relationship between therapists' technique, therapists' CT, and patients' mentalization, in a sample of patients with PDs undergoing a 40-session program of sequential brief-adlerian psychodynamic psychotherapy, a psychodynamic therapeutic model specifically developed for the treatment of PDs in public mental health services.

Method: Eighty-seven patients with PD and their therapists completed ratings of mentalization (mentalization imbalances scale and reflective functioning questionnaire), CT (therapist response questionnaire), and therapists' intervention (comparative psychotherapy process scale) at five different time points (Sessions 5, 10, 20, 30, and 40).

Psychopathological Functioning Levels (PFLs) and their possible relevance in psychiatric treatments: a qualitative research project.

Background: Symptoms description is often not enough to provide clinicians with guidelines for treatments and patients' clinical history does not represent an exhaustive source of data. Psychopathological dysfunctions are known to relate to the core disturbances that underlie different forms of psychopathology so the identification of such dysfunctions could be helpful for treatments. Some tools are available although highly complex and lengthy.

Supervised team management, with or without structured psychotherapy, in heavy users of a mental health service with borderline personality disorder: a two-year follow-up preliminary randomized study.

Background: Individuals affected by severe Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are often heavy users of Mental Health Services (MHS). Short-term treatments currently used in BPD therapy are useful to target disruptive behaviors but they are less effective in reducing heavy MHS use. Therefore, alternative short-term treatments, less complex than long-term psychodynamic psychotherapies but specifically oriented to BPD core problems, need to be developed to reduce MHS overuse.