Bringing Borderline Personality Disorder into the Fold of Usual Care

Sponsored by the Karen C. Wells Lectureship

Dr. Choi-Kain is currently the Director of the Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute (GPDI), an internationally recognized center of training for empirically supported treatments for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and research on outcomes as well as the social cognitive mechanisms targeted in these interventions. Her research training began as a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of John Gunderson, M.D. After three years of research training, Dr. Choi-Kain developed an intensive residential treatment program, the Gunderson Residence, combining various empirically supported therapies with a milieu setting emphasizing rehabilitation of social and occupational functioning. At the same time, she expanded and diversified McLean Hospital's adult BPD treatment program to include mentalization-based treatment (MBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)/DBT for PTSD training clinics as outpatient programs, to both train clinicians in these approaches while also providing insurance-based care. She has written three books on various applications of Gunderson's Good Psychiatric Management (GPM) adapted to different levels of care, clinical professionals, age groups, and stepped care. She leads the training organization of GPM, and the community of certified trainers. Dr. Choi-Kain has also written extensively about the problems of access to care and scalability of our armamentarium of BPD treatments, publishing meta-analytic evaluations of the effects of treatment as usual, as well as on dropout rates. Her aim as a researcher is to expand the scope and reach of effective interventions for BPD as a regular fixture of routine mental health care, to allow earlier intervention and facilitation of recovery before the burdens of illness too greatly diminishes developmental opportunities critical to fostering healthy personality functioning.