About the NPI

The NPI is a highly specialized center for the treatment of people with personality problems. Personality problems do not arise overnight. It is often a pattern that has existed for years about how someone feels in relationships, how someone thinks and acts, feels about themselves and how someone deals with stress or setbacks.

In our treatments, there is a lot of emphasis on the background of the complaints and problems that someone experiences. This allows new ways to deal with it.

It is our profession to continuously improve the treatments in consultation with the client and referrer. We measure the results and satisfaction of clients and conduct scientific research. The NPI trains psychiatrists and psychologists. Practitioners from other institutions can ask the NPI for advice about their own client with a personality problem. The NPI is part of Arkin.

You can come to the NPI for treatment if you experience problems related to the way in which your personality has developed. You suffer from persistent feelings of dissatisfaction with yourself, you experience the same problems in relationships with others over and over again, or you are unable to complete education or hold on to work. Often manifests itself because you suffer from symptoms such as depression, anxiety, or traumatic memories. These complaints keep coming back despite previous forms of treatment and/or use of medication.

We also have a relatively small specialized department for young people up to the age of 23. This focuses mainly on the problems in the personality development of children. Parents are always involved in these treatments.

We work from a development-oriented, psychodynamic vision. This means that people with personality problems are not born with those problems, but that behaviors, feelings or thoughts that currently bother you once arose as a way to deal with difficult circumstances in life. So they were once helpful. These patterns are so normal to you that you are not really aware of them. These patterns hinder your personal development to become a balanced person with a good relationship  with yourself and with other people. It is also often less possible to shape life the way you want to. Therapy can help to see through these patterns first with the therapist (and sometimes also with group members). Insight alone is not enough. Really breaking free from entrenched patterns is best achieved through new, corrective experiences with others. First with the therapist (and possibly with group members) and later also in your own daily life, so that it really starts to feel different. This creates more room to develop yourself further as a person.

With the treatments at the NPI, we aim to achieve lasting improvements. For example, in the way you see and value yourself or in the way you interact with others. This improvement is achieved through psychotherapy, sometimes in combination with medication. Psychotherapy takes place in a group unless otherwise agreed. In case of serious problems, there is a possibility of day treatment (1 day/week). Most treatments last between 6 months and 2 years.

In the conversations, the therapist will look for conscious and more unconscious backgrounds of problems with you. Suggestions can also be given on how to better deal with symptoms and complaints and sometimes situations are practiced. In this way, we help you to regain control of your own life, to eliminate stagnation and to promote personal growth.

The NPI was founded in 1946. The treatments were originally based only on the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was one of the first to assume that problems can be understood and solved by talking about the development history of someone's personality.

Three-quarters of a century later, the number of specialist and highly specialized treatments at the NPI has expanded enormously. This allows us to determine much better which approach is most suitable for whom. Scientific research has revealed much more about the effectiveness of treatments. The NPI only offers treatments whose effect has been scientifically proven. This can also be a relatively short treatment. At the NPI, 'short if possible, long if necessary' applies.