TRAP

TRAP: A long term outcome and process study of a residential treatment for treatment refractory adolescents with personality disorders
Dineke Feenstra, Annelies Laurenssen and Joost Hutsebaut 

Personality disorders in adolescents is, for some, still a point of debate. Recent research however, has shown that personality disorders are far from unusual in adolescents. Furthermore, there is convincing evidence that the diagnosis of a personality disorder is a valid way to identify a group of severely disturbed adolescents with a negative prognosis into adulthood. Although the number of (outcome) studies of psychotherapy for adolescents has increased, important limitations still do exist. First of all, adolescent therapy research is characterized by a lack of developmental sensitivity. Moreover, there is little known about effective treatment for adolescents with personality disorders. 

In the beginning of 2006 we launched the project TRAP: a long term outcome and process study of a residential treatment for treatment refractory adolescents with personality disorders. This projects consists of two parts: 

PART I: The first part of TRAP will be focused on the validity and reliability of the diagnosis of personality disorders in adolescents. We will investigate the prevalence of personality disorders in adolescents. Also, the burden of disease and societal costs of personality disordered adolescents will be investigated. And furthermore, we will investigate the usefulness of an instrument measuring (mal)adaptive personality functioning (originally developed for adults) for adolescents. 

PART II: The second part of TRAP will focus mainly on the (long term) treatment outcome of a residential treatment for personality disordered adolescents. Secondly, the predictive value of patient characteristics and treatment outcome as well as dropout will be investigated. Finally, we will investigate the relationship between structural relational changes and relapse in follow up.