Hi rainbow

I agree with sunrise that it would be much better to do a weekly skills group instead. That way you would be supported over a longer period of time- it takes *time* to embed skills in your daily life- plus with partial hospitalization you'd be removed from your daily life, so you'd have fewer opportunities to try out the skills in situ. What we know about learning new skills is that they don't automatically generalise across contexts, so if you learn them in a therapy room, that doesn't mean you can use them in real life. That's what the phone coaching in DBT is for.

I'd also totally agree with your concerns about being with people who are much more poorly than you. Many of my most destructive behaviours were 'learnt' in a hospital, as they are highly contagious, and unless the contingencies are managed very very well, the whole set up can quickly become so that those in unrelenting crisis get the most support and attention which reinforces... unrelenting crisis (surprise surprise- though incredibly, many inpatient units still seem to be clueless about this)!

If you are going to do individual DBT therapy alongside the skills training, I think it would be helpful to have a think about what behaviours you would target. Individual DBT is focused on eradicating problem behaviours in a hierarchy. Most important are life-threatening (suicide and self harm behaviours), then 'therapy interfering', then 'quality of life interfering'. Each session is based around an occasion in the last week where you engaged in a target behaviour. You do a behaviour chain looking at how the behaviour came about, and identifying where you could have used skills instead. I guess I'm just not sure what your target behaviours would be?

Just wanted to add that there is a fab free online DBT class via a yahoo group. They email out the homework on Saturdays and you post your homework, then a moderator replies to it. I think the DBT skills are tricky to grasp, and it'd be difficult to use only the group unless you were exceptionally well motivated, but it's great to do alongside group skills training, and while you're waiting. We learn any new skill best through practice practice practice

I looked at that and they mention both an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) and a Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP). I am familiar with IOPs too. They are indeed different from PHPs. Rainbow, I do think an IOP would be a better fit than a PHP, but I think the weekly program would be even better. There are lots of models of service delivery, aren't there?