Group Schema Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder.

International multi-site RCT of two versions of Group Schema Therapy compared to treatment as usual for Borderline Personality Disorder in reducing symptom severity and improving quality of life

Status

Completed

Phases

Unknown

Study type

Interventional

Source

ANZCTR

Registry ID

ACTRN12611000158965

Acronym

STTURT

Enrollment

496

Registered

2011-02-09

Start date

2011-03-01

Completion date

2016-05-18

Last updated

2025-09-15

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

None listed

Brief summary

In the last five years, a treatment specifically developed for borderline personality disorder namely Schema Therapy has been found to be more effective than existing usual treatments and a specialized form of psychodynamic therapy. When compared to other specialized treatments, Schema Therapy has very low drop-out rate and is very effective, not only in reducing symptoms, but in improving quality of life. Schema Therapy can lead to full recovery from BPD and normal functioning. However, this schema therapy is yet to be tested outside of the centres that developed the programme. A large scale international study to investigate the efficacy of the treatment programme across six countries in several different languages is planned for 2011. The research will compare two different delivery modes of Schema Therapy with existing treatments to see if there is some benefit of this new therapy. The study will enable us to determine not only if the therapy is beneficial in other parts of the world, but by including an Australian site, we can make specific recommendations in an Australian context.

Interventions

Experimental A: 118 group Schema Therapy sessions over 2 years with max. 17 individual sessions. Experimental B: 64 group Schema Therapy over 2 years with max. 61 individual sessions. Control: Treatment as usual - the standard treatment given for that patient at the treatment center. individual sessions last 50 minutes and group sessions 90 minutes

Study design

Allocation

Randomised controlled trial

Intervention model

Parallel

Primary purpose

Treatment

Masking

Blinded (masking used)

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

All

Age

18 Years to 65 Years

Healthy volunteers

Inclusion criteria

1. Age 18-65 years 2. Primary DSM-IV diagnosis of BPD (assessed with the SCID-II interview) 3. BPD severity above 20 on the BPDSI interview 4. Willingness to participate in the study (informed consent procedure) 5. Ability to participate in (group) treatment and research for 2 years (e.g., no plans to move to another city).

Exclusion criteria

1. Lifetime psychotic disorder (short stress-related episodes are allowed, as described in DSM-IV BPD criterion 9) 2. IQ < 80 (in case of suspicion of low IQ, to be assessed with full intelligence test) 3. Unable to read, speak, or write the language used at the site (in case of suspicion an official language test is to be used) 4. Bipolar disorder type 1 (SCID-1) 5. Dissociative Identity Disorder (confirmed by senior investigators) 6. Full or sub-threshold (defined as one less than the number of criteria to qualify for the diagnosis) narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder (SCID-2)

Outcome results