Psychiatrists and Forensic Psychology

Biography

Biography: Barbara Sartini

Abstract

Personality disorders are diagnosed in 40-60% of psychiatric patients. Those with personality disorder manifested great difficulties in interpersonal relationships and in dealing with everyday life. Although the causes of the disorder are multi-factorial, mainly, the common factors concern hypersensitivity to life events, hyper emotional reactivity and slow return to a baseline psychic equilibrium. The peculiarity is the change of these types of personalities, so emotionally vulnerable, to resilient personalities. Resilience is the ability to cope effectively to everyday adversities, despite the past life's adverse and traumatic events. It is not a feature, that is present or absent in the individual, but, instead, refers to behaviors, thoughts and actions that can be learned by anyone. In my job, I have been able to observe and verify how the sociotherapy approach in the therapeutic community (Maxwell Jones's model) integrated with the STEPPS's training (Nancy Bloom) can develop resilient personalities. This therapeutic and riabilitative integration allows increasing in the patients those skills necessary to resume positively the control of their lives, doing the individual experiences as relationships with caring and supportive people, taking positions of responsibility (sociotherapy), awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and learning emotional management skills and problem solving (STEPPS).