The PDM was released this month and presents an exciting, new, useful and invaluable resource for clinical work.
Regardless of your theoretical orientation the new PDM offers a refreshing, new approach to diagnosis and assessment.
The PDM goes far beyond a diagnosis that is based on a list of symptoms, to include descriptions of healthy functional patterns and healthy personality.
The New York Times, in its review of this new and exciting development, states that the PDM "Emphasizes the importance of individual personality patterns...which qualify as full-blown disorders only at the extremes."
Whether you are psychodynamically oriented or not, you are likely to benefit from reviewing this new PDM approach to assessment of clients' full range of human functioning.
The PDM special task force has gone further than the DSM and developed a new diagnostic manual that is based on current neuroscience, treatment outcome studies, other empirical investigations, as well as on psychoanalytic theory.
The PDM is a result of a collaborative task force, which was appointed by a coalition of prominent organizations representing most psychoanalytically oriented therapists.
The PDM is likely-to-become-popular new manual, which covers all ages from infancy and early childhood through adulthood and old age, is designed to complement the DSM and ICD.
The new manual insists that personality be evaluated first and symptoms considered as secondary. This is because symptoms cannot be understood, assessed or treated in the absence of an understanding of the personality structure of the person who has the symptoms.
While the PDM sees it as important to differentiate between "personality disorder" and personality per se, the PDM does not present a hard-and-fast dividing line between the two but suggests a continuum of severity.
For each personality disorder, clinicians learn what transference and countertransference reactions to expect in the clinical hour and what treatment approach to consider. For many diagnoses the possible psychological roots of the client's problems are mentioned.
Depending on their evaluation of a client's location on this severity dimension, therapists need to behave with important differences in emphasis, level of activity, explicitness of boundary setting, frequency of sessions and other features of technique.
The psychodynamic manual considers subjective experiences and typical relationship patterns in the description of a person's overall functioning.
The PDM addresses the full range of mental functioning by using a multi-dimensional approach to describe a person's functioning -- including ways of engaging in the therapeutic process.
Understanding the PDM in the context of the history of other diagnostic manuals.
Recognizing how the PDM responds to concerns with the DSM.
Utilizing the information from the PDM for possible etiologies and implications for treatment.
Learning about the possible impact of the PDM on the field of psychotherapy.
The content of this densely written, 850 page manual is designed to expand many clinicians' understanding of their clients' personalities, the meaning, extent and the roots of their suffering, as well as appropriate treatment approaches. This course offers a well laid out, systematized summary of the individual diagnoses and their implications for the therapeutic process. Much of the course material is presented in a well-structured bullet-point format that allows the reader to grasp the PDM easily and to use the training material as a valuable reference tool in the future.
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