David is a Child Psychiatrist working with complex, acutely unwell adolescents in an adolescent inpatient unit. Starting his career as a General Practitioner working predominantly with drug and alcohol problems, David retrained as a Psychiatrist before commencing a 30-year career working with early and severe presentations of mental illness. His Masters Thesis which saw him qualify with his Child Specialisation focused on understanding personality disorders through the innovative, analytically-informed model that is the central concept of this talk.