Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Short-Term Virtual Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills Training Workshop for Graduate Students in India

An increasing burden of mental health problems paired with an inadequately trained workforce contributes to the mental health treatment gap in low- and middle-income countries such as India. An untapped resource in efforts to address the shortage of adequately trained mental health professionals is students enrolled in mental health graduate training programs. The current study evaluated the feasibility and effectiveness of a four-week virtual DBT Skills training workshop using a mixed-methods approach. Master’s students in a counseling psychology program from India (N = 42) participated in weekly virtual DBT Skills training workshops and engaged in a self-learning process with supplementary materials. Quantitative analyses were conducted on a subset of participants who completed both, pre- and post-training surveys ( N = 22, 90.9% women). We assessed two clinical training outcomes through participants' ratings of DBT Skills knowledge and self-efficacy in counseling at the pre-DBT Skills and post-DBT Skills training phases. Findings indicated that Master’s students’ DBT Knowledge increased significantly from pre- to post-training, whereas confidence in cofacilitating DBT Skills groups showed a modest, nonsignificant increase after correcting for multiple comparisons. A separate subset of participants (90% women) participated in focus groups at three time points (pretraining: n = 20; post-training: n = 17; postfacilitation of DBT Skills training: n = 11), sharing their workshop expectations, training workshop experiences, and experiences facilitating DBT Skills trainings. Overall, findings suggested that our short-term, virtually delivered DBT Skills training workshop effectively enhanced Master’s trainees' knowledge of DBT Skills with implications for future training workshops.