Taking in the entire spectrum of personality disorders--from the DSM "Anxious Cluster" to antisocial personality disorder--this book offers practical guidance for assessing the amenability of patients to psychotherapy. By focusing on which patients are likely to respond well to therapeutic intervention and which will prove most resistive, Personality Disordered Patients: Treatable and Untreatable can assist clinicians in determining with what kinds of patients they will most likely succeed and with which ones failure is almost a certainty.

Michael Stone establishes the attributes that affect this amenability--such as self-reflection, motivation, and life circumstances--as guidelines for evaluating patients, then describes borderline and other personality-disordered patients with varying levels of symptoms, from mild to severe. Sharing observations from many years of practice, he identifies factors associated with low treatability and reviews personality traits whose presence, if intense--even if unaccompanied by a definable personality disorder--creates severe problems for psychotherapy. Numerous case studies provide examples that will help clinicians determine which of their patients are most likely to benefit from their efforts and thereby establish their own limits of effectiveness.