Readiness to Engage in Treatments for Personality Disorder

Abstract

Treatment non-completion in personality disorder (PD) treatments is prevalent and non-completers show poorer treatment outcomes than completers. Identifying risk factors for non-completion, and particularly causal risk factors, is important to inform criteria for treatment selection, design treatments that are responsive to non-completion risk, and design interventions to minimise non-completion. Risk factors lie in a number of domains, including individual, treatment, and environmental characteristics. A model of Readiness to Engage in Treatment for Personality Disorders is presented to guide research and assessment. Pre-therapy preparation is one potentially valuable approach to improving treatment engagement and retention, and examples of interventions are described. Throughout this review, the relevance of research to forensic services is specifically highlighted.

Keywords:

• treatment engagement
• treatment readiness
• personality disorder
• offenders

Acknowledgments

This article is based upon a presentation given at the 2nd Bergen Conference on the Treatment of Psychopathy, Bergen, Norway in November 2011.