Introduction to the special feature on the integrated treatment of personality disorder.

The solid evidence that personality disorders can be treated effectively goes side by side with, on the one hand, sparse evidence for disorders other than borderline and for personality disorders co-occurrent with one another, and, on the other hand, with a relative lack of knowledge about the actual effective mechanisms of change that underpin successful psychotherapies. In this introduction we present the rationale for this special feature, advocating for an integrated treatment of personality pathology in which empirically-supported strategies and techniques are selected from different traditions on the basis of the pragmatic principle of what works.