Patient personality and therapist responses in the psychotherapy of adolescents with depressive disorders: toward the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual - third edition
Accepted: March 16, 2024
HTML: 6
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
Depressive disorders in adolescence pose unique challenges for assessment and treatment, particularly due to their high comorbidity with various personality disorders. Moreover, young depressed patients may elicit very intense and difficult-to-manage emotional responses in therapists (in this context, countertransference). This study aimed at empirically identifying specific personality disorders (or subtypes) among adolescents with depressive pathology and exploring distinct countertransference patterns emerging in their psychotherapy: 100 adolescents (58 with depressive disorders; 42 with other clinical conditions) were assessed by their respective clinicians (n=100) using the psychodiagnostic chart-adolescent of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) - second edition, and the therapist response questionnaire for adolescents. Results showed that depressed adolescent patients exhibited marked traits of four personality subtypes (i.e., depressive, anxious-avoidant, narcissistic, and borderline) characterized by different levels of mental functioning and personality organization. These subtypes were predictably related to specific clinicians’ emotional responses, even when controlling for the intensity of depressive symptomatology. Patients with depressive or anxious-avoidant personality subtypes evoked more positive countertransference responses, whereas patients with narcissistic or borderline subtypes elicited strong and hard-to-face emotional responses in therapists. Consistent with the next edition of the PDM, the study emphasizes the importance of comprehensive psychodynamic assessment in the developmental age, which frames depressive disorders in the context of accurate emerging personality and mental functioning profiles. This approach, which also relies heavily on the clinician’s subjective experience in therapy, provides crucial information on how to specifically tailor interventions that more effectively meet the needs of adolescents with these heterogeneous and complex clinical conditions.
How to Cite
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.
Similar Articles
- Agata Andò, Marzia Di Girolamo, Claudia Pignolo, Alessandro Zennaro, Luciano Giromini, Amedeo Minichino, Adriana Salatino, Rosalba Morese, Personality features and vulnerability to stress: a case study on hyperhidrosis , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 22 No. 1 (2019)
- Tommaso Boldrini, Marco Solmi, Introduction to the Special Section on Clinical High Risk for Mental Illness: Transdiagnostic Framework, Detection Strategies, Assessment, Treatment and Outcome , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 23 No. 1 (2020)
- Rachele Mariani, Silvia Monaco, Christopher Christian , Michela Di Trani, Dreaming in quarantine: linguistic analysis of referential process of dreams during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 24 No. 2 (2021): SPECIAL ISSUE "Working on dreams, from psychotherapy to neuroscience"
- Raquel Pereira, António Pazo Pires, David Neto, Therapist self-awareness and perception of actual performance: the effects of listening to one recorded session , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 27 No. 1 (2024)
- Osmano Oasi, Simone Maggio, Sara Pacella, Sara Molgora, Dropout and narcissism: an exploratory research about situational factors and personality variables of the psychotherapist , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 22 No. 2 (2019)
- Oliver Evers, Paul Schröder-Pfeifer, Heidi Möller, Svenja Taubner, How do personal and professional characteristics influence the development of psychotherapists in training: Results from a longitudinal study , Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome: Vol. 22 No. 3 (2019)
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.