Personality disorders are mental health conditions that affect how people manage their feelings and how they relate to themselves and others. People may behave in ways that are different to how others expect them to behave. For example they might:
- become overwhelmed by feelings such as anxiety, anger, worthlessness and distress
- feel emotionally disconnected from the world around them, or lose sense of reality
- experience difficulties in maintaining stable and close relationships
- have difficulty in managing negative thoughts without self harming, for example using drugs and alcohol, taking overdoses or cutting themselves.
People with a personality disorder often have other mental health problems that they are being treated for, such as depression or eating disorders.
We are a small, specialist service and our main role is to provide support, training and supervision to frontline staff working with people who have personality disorders, in order to help reduce risk of harm and improve wellbeing. We also provide a small amount of individual and group treatment programmes. Our core approach recognises the importance of a persons unique strengths and their relationships help promote recovery.
We offer a range of services to support individuals with personality disorder, including:
- assessment and diagnosis
- care coordination and working together to identify and gain a fuller understanding of problems that individuals may be facing
- recommendations for treatment options such as group or individual therapy
- psycho-educational skills based groups and psychotherapy groups
- supervision and support of frontline staff
- consultation and advice for staff
- training, clinical supervision and reflective practice for staff teams,
How we work
We are a small, limited service and allocations are agreed through discussions with local mental health managers. Our service can be accessed through the personality disorder locality leads via your care coordinator or directly through the clinical manager.