Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Suicide and self-injury are serious issues in Canada, and rates of suicidal behaviours are disproportionately high in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). BPD involves instability of self-image, relationships, emotions, behaviour, and cognitions. There is clear need to effectively treat, and reduce the suicidal behaviours, in BPD. Individuals with BPD display difficulties with emotion regulation, and suicidal or self-injurious behaviour in BPD is conceptualized as an attempt to regulate emotions. Effective treatments for BPD such as Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) focus on increasing healthy emotion regulation. However, these therapies are long (i.e., at least one year) and labour-intensive (i.e., involve both individual and group therapy components). Canadians would thus benefit from research examining the individual characteristics that render those with BPD as more or less likely to benefit from a shortened, group-therapy only version of DBT (i.e., 20-week DBT skills groups). The proposed study will collaborate with an ongoing study at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (CAMH) assessing the effectiveness of a 20-week DBT skills group (as an adjunct to treatment as usual) compared to a waitlist control in the treatment of chronically suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious behaviours in BPD individuals. The proposed study will examine whether baseline difficulties with emotion regulation (i.e., decreased ability to change or regulate emotional responses as indicated by self-report and bodily changes in an experimental task) predict the reduction of suicidal and self-injurious behaviours in BPD individuals in a 20-week DBT skills group. The findings in the proposed study will indicate if baseline difficulties with emotion regulation can be used to select effective and efficient treatments for some individuals with BPD, thereby reducing the burden of long and labour-intensive treatments for patients, health care providers, and Canadian taxpayers.