Skip to main content
ABCT 2023 Annual Convention Main banner
Final Program


Program Flipbook
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
Ticketed Session
Ticketed Session
Recorded Session
Recorded Session
Back
ViewAttendees 4

Symposia

Transdiagnostic

Session: Building Toolkits with our Clients: Predictors and Outcomes of Treatment Skills

3 - (SYM 71) Does Use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy Phone Coaching Lead to Improvements in Skills Use

Saturday, November 18, 2023
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM PST
Location: Ashnola (301), Level 3
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT; Linehan, 1993) is a multimodal treatment developed for individuals experiencing chronic suicidality and borderline personality disorder (BPD) and is comprised of four treatment modalities: individual therapy, skills training, therapist consultation team, and telephone coaching (Linehan, 1993). Between-session phone coaching is typically identified as the mode of therapy most associated with improving skills generalization; however, it also serves to reduce life-threatening crisis behavior. Despite preliminary evidence suggesting its utility  (e.g., Chalker et al., 2015; Edwards et al., 2021), phone coaching is often cited as a barrier to DBT implementation efforts in part due to provider concerns (e.g., Ditty et al., 2015; Landes et al., 2019). However, existing literature of phone coaching suggests that calls are relatively infrequent (~2.5 times/month; e.g., Linehan & Heard, 1993; Oliveira & Rizvi, 2018). Phone coaching is associated with greater client and therapist satisfaction, reductions in dropout rate, avoidant behaviors, and behavioral dysregulation (Chalker et al., 2015), as well as reductions in urges to engage in NSSI (Edwards et al., 2021). To this end, we investigated whether (1) greater use of crisis contacts would predict decreases in life-threatening behaviors and (2) greater use of skills-generalization contacts would predict increases in adaptive coping strategies (i.e., DBT skills). In addition, because phone consultation may serve multiple functions, we also examined whether crisis contacts were associated with changes in adaptive coping, as well as whether skills-generalization contacts were associated with decreases in life-threatening behavior. Data were collected from N = 83 adult clients receiving 6-months of DBT treatment for BPD at a research and training clinic. The sample had a mean age of 28.87 (SD = 9.09), was predominantly white (78.3%), female (78.3%), and non-Hispanic (86.7%), with an income under $30k per year (57.9%). While data cleaning and analysis are underway, p</span>reliminary data suggest that over the course of treatment there were an average of 7.45 skills generalization calls (SD = 9.57) and 2.32 calls related to life-threatening behavior (SD = 5.98) by each client. To our knowledge this is the first study of whether frequency of phone coaching use is tied to reductions in life-threatening behaviors and increases in skillful behavior.