Is There a Free DBT Manual? The Honest Answer
No. Every official DBT manual, including Marsha Linehan's DBT Skills Training Manual and the companion Handouts and Worksheets volume, is a commercial Guilford Press title. Unlike the government-published treatment manuals in this library, no agency ever released a public domain DBT protocol. We checked SAMHSA, NIDA, the VA, state health departments, and open educational resource repositories so you do not have to: nothing with a genuinely open license exists.
The "free DBT manual" PDFs that circulate online are, almost without exception, unauthorized scans of those in-print Guilford books or unauthorized derivatives of them. Guilford's photocopy license, printed in the books themselves, grants reproduction rights only to individual purchasers for use with their own clients. A downloaded copy sits outside that license, and the scans are usually outdated first editions anyway. Fine to have skimmed one in grad school; not something a practice should build on.
Here is what legitimately exists instead, depending on what you actually need.
If you want the real manuals
Buy them once; the purchaser license then covers the handouts for your own clients: DBT Skills Training Manual (Revised Edition) and DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. For formal training, the developer's training organization is Behavioral Tech.
The one genuinely free federal DBT resource
The VA's South Central MIRECC publishes DBT orientation materials ("DBT: A Visual Review") that introduce the model and its skills. Useful for orientation and psychoeducation; it is not a treatment manual and does not claim to be.
If you need free DBT-informed session materials
DBT's skills and concepts (Wise Mind, distress tolerance, DEAR MAN, TIPP, radical acceptance) are clinical methods, and methods are not copyrightable; only Linehan's specific expression of them is. Our DBT skills collection is written from scratch in our own words and layouts: worksheets for Wise Mind, DEAR MAN, TIPP, distress tolerance, and the rest of the module skills, free to print and use with clients.
This page is informational, not legal advice. Therapy Resource is not affiliated with Guilford Press, Behavioral Tech, or the Department of Veterans Affairs. If you are in crisis, contact 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or call 911.