1.I have self-harmed in the past year, or the urge is regularly present.
2.I have made a suicide attempt, or suicidal thinking comes and goes rather than only arriving with a crisis.
3.I have been hospitalised for safety at some point.
4.I have a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, or a clinician has raised it with me.
5.My close relationships follow a pattern of intense closeness and then rupture.
6.When I get upset it takes hours, not minutes, to come back down.
7.I have tried therapy more than once and it ended badly, or I left.
8.I do things impulsively that cost me — spending, using, quitting, leaving.
9.Nobody has ever actually taught me anything about how emotions work.
10.I could realistically give four to six hours a week to treatment for a year.
How to read it
The questions are weighted the way a clinician would weight them, which is to say: not by how much distress you’re in, but by whether the specific components of a full programme have a job to do. Someone can be in enormous pain and still be better served by twelve weeks of a different treatment. Someone else can look relatively functional and genuinely need the whole structure.
The last question — about capacity — is the one people skip past and the one that most often decides the outcome. Four to six hours a week for a year is a real ask, and the commonest reason people drop out of DBT isn’t motivation but arithmetic. Answering it honestly at the start beats discovering it in month four.
Whatever the answer
If it pointed at the full programme, the four screening questions will tell you quickly whether a clinician is actually offering one. If it pointed at something smaller, adherent versus informed lays out what you would be choosing between, and what DBT costs covers the money.