Michaela Swales, PhD

Michaela Swales, PhD, is Professor in Clinical Psychology and Programme Director of the North Wales Clinical Psychology Programme, Bangor University and an accredited DBT Supervisor.  She trained in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Seattle in 1994 / 95 with Marsha Linehan and for twenty years ran a clinical programme for suicidal young people in an inpatient service as an accredited therapist.  Michaela is the Director of the British Isles Training Team, a training team recognised internationally for its quality.  She has trained more than a thousand professionals in DBT, seeding over 600 programmes, in both the UK and further afield.  She has pioneered the use of benchmarking to assess the performance of DBT teams in routine clinical practice.  She co-authored, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: Distinctive Features (2009; 2017) and Changing Behavior in DBT: Problem-Solving in Action (2015).  She is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook of DBT (2019).  Her primary research interest is the effective implementation of evidence-based psychological therapies in routine clinical practice. Michaela was a member of the Working Group on Classification of Personality Disorders, reporting to the World Health Organisation (WHO) International Advisory Group for the Revision of ICD-10 Mental and Behavioural Disorders.  She is President of the World DBT Association and of the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders.