Fruzzetti Joins Willow Springs Center

We are pleased to announce that Alan E. Fruzzetti, Ph.D., has been appointed to the professional staff at Willow Springs Center to serve as clinical consultant to the Adolescent Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Program. In his new role, Dr. Fruzzetti participates in weekly DBT consultation team meetings, supervises the doctoral student treating DBT patients and is a member of the DBT program development team.

After more than a year of development, Willow Springs Center opened its Adolescent DBT Program in 2010. With Dr. Fruzzetti's consultation, the Willow Springs DBT program strives continuously to deliver a fully adherent model of DBT in a secure residential setting.

The entire DBT clinical team, including our medical director, has completed intensive training in DBT as developed by Marsha M. Linehan, Ph.D., and her colleagues at the University of Washington.
Dr. Fruzzetti holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Washington and serves as the Director of the Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Research Program at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Current director of research for the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder, Dr. Fruzzetti also has been an investigator on numerous DBT studies including those related to the treatment of suicidal adult women and young adults, women victims of domestic violence and families of people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

He is the author of Families and Borderline Personality Disorder: A Dialectical Behavior Therapy Guide to Finding Peace in Your Family (Pub. October 2012) and The High-Conflict Couple: A Dialectical Behavior Therapy Guide to Finding Peace, Intimacy & Validation.

The Nevada Psychological Association named Dr. Fruzzetti psychologist of the year for 2010.

His clinical interests range from interpersonal and family models of psychopathology (e.g. borderline personality, depression, suicidality) and interpersonal processes (e.g. the role of validating and invalidating behaviors in couple and parent-child interactions) to applying DBT in treatment with individuals, couples and families.

In her foreword to Dr. Fruzzetti's book The High-Conflict Couple: A Dialectical Behavior Therapy Guide to Finding Peace, Intimacy & Validation, Dr. Linehan described Dr. Fruzzetti as being at the forefront of work "integrating mindfulness, emotion regulation, accurate expression and validation into a coherent package."

As part of the very first DBT team at the University of Washington, Dr. Fruzzetti "gave the first critical feedback on the treatment and was a major contributor to the development of DBT treatment in its current form," Dr. Linehan wrote. "Alan has been working with DBT for 20 years, teaching it and adapting it for couples, families and adolescents."