Working through the Workbook - Self-Directed DBT Skills

A 3-month DBT workbook

Regulate Intense Emotions and Create Lasting Change with Dialectical Behavior Therapy

By Kiki Fielding and Eliot Weiner

Penguin Random House 2023

At last! The book I've been waiting for. DBT skills training you can do without signing up to a paid course. This text is a version of the 12-month DBT skills programme which is currently only on offer if you can afford it. Even in hospitals, where the greatest need for DBT must surely present, the full course isn't covered (shorter versions are offered instead).

It annoys me that effective treatments for distressing psychological symptoms so often have a pound sign attached. I recently turned down an opportunity to join a DBT group because I simply didn't have the money.

Most DBT texts emphasise that good outcomes (a reduction of distressing symptoms) are optimised when all 4 modules are studied. When Max Goodwin, the innovative new director of the (fictional) hospital in Netflix's New Amsterdam takes over, he orders his psychologists to run CBT and DBT programmes as a priority. This is just after he's sacked most of the cardiologists (who have been doing private work in a public hospital), and before he gets the hospital to buy a cheap flat for a homeless man who has been costing them thousands of dollars in appointments. If only New Amsterdam were real...