DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents

"Dialectical behavior therapy has revolutionized cognitive behavioral therapies with constructs such as mindfulness and acceptance now permeating behavioral approaches. Adolescents differ from adult clients with regard to emotional and cognitive developmental level and context: they overwhelmingly attend school, and reside with their families and depend on them for daily functioning, including for getting to therapy. Thus, we considered developmentally relevant as well as family-based targets, cognitive processing and capability differences, distinct liability issues, and interventions with their environments. Our adapted adolescent skills handouts are being used in multiple research settings; many clinical settings around the world employ some version of our materials. The publication of this manual makes them more widely available along with group management strategies and skills teaching notes to assist the DBT skills trainer working with adolescents"--

From leading experts who have trained thousands of professionals in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), this manual provides indispensable tools for treating adolescents with emotional or behavioral problems of any level of severity. Clinicians are guided step by step to teach teens and parents five sets of skills: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Walking the Middle Path (a family-based module developed by the authors specifically for teens), Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. Designed for optimal clinical utility, the book features session outlines, teaching notes, discussion points, examples, homework assignments, and 85 reproducible handouts, in a large-size format for easy photocopying. Purchasers also get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials.