Understand DBT skills.
Practice in your own situation.

Between “I have read about DEAR MAN” and “I know what I am going to say tomorrow” lies practice — and that is exactly what books leave out.

At a glance

What	An interactive practice space for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
Form	Installable web app (PWA) and native Android app — both usable fully offline and without an account
Content	38 DBT skills (32 individual skills + 6 skill bundles) from all four DBT modules, plus a lexicon of 41 terms
Areas	Six — four follow the skill you choose, two apply across all of them
Languages	German and English, switchable at any time while you work
Privacy	Everything you enter stays on your device. No cloud, no server, no tracking
Foundation	The skills of evidence-based DBT, anchored in Linehan and McKay — the source is visible on every piece of content
Not	Not a substitute for diagnosis, therapy or crisis care

Koshka is reading along

A black cat with a reference manual comments throughout this guide. She appears wherever an action has a clinical reason behind it — why a step is built this way and not another, and where it comes from. If you only want to know which button to press, you can skip her.

She explains and puts things in context. She does not treat.

You have a difficult conversation tomorrow — with your manager, a parent, a friend — and you do not know how to start. Or you are emotionally flooded right now and need a way to come down now, before you say something you will regret.

DBT has effective skills for exactly these moments. They usually sit in books and worksheets, though: explained, not practised. Between “I have read about DEAR MAN” and “I have a sentence I can really say tomorrow” lies a gap that reading alone does not close.

A process, not a content collection

The app does not simply reproduce DBT content; it follows the path DBT itself takes: recognise your own state, choose the fitting skill, practise it on a real situation, check the result. That is why you do not begin in a table of contents but at the Emotion Compass — with the question of how you are doing right now.

Who it is for

• People who already know DBT skills — from therapy or a skills group — and want to make them usable in everyday life.
• People facing a tense conversation — setting a boundary, a conflict, a hurt — who want to put it into words and rehearse beforehand.
• People in therapeutic care, as a supplement between sessions: practise, print, take it with you.
• Professionals as a demonstration and practice tool.

Five commitments

What Marcus'Mend explicitly is not

Marcus'Mend is a learning and practice tool for DBT skills. It replaces no diagnosis, no therapy and no crisis care. When things become acute, the way leads to professional help — the app points you there, it does not take its place.

Choose a skill, load a situation, put it into words step by step, take the result with you. About ten minutes the first time.

This is the main path through the app. It takes about ten minutes the first time and ends with a finished, printable text. All the other areas (Chapter 3) hang off this path.

If you get stuck

Why the text breaks into steps

Because an acronym like DEAR MAN is not a mnemonic but a sequence. First describe the situation, then express your own feeling, then assert the request — start with the request and you lose the ground it stands on. The app does not enforce the order, but it shows it.

And the traps sit next to the input field rather than at the end for a reason: a sentence can be corrected while it is forming; a finished one can only be defended.

Source per step inside the app — Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual; supplemented by McKay, The DBT Skills Workbook.

Four areas follow the skill you choose at the top. Two are what lead you to it in the first place.

The area bar is deliberately split in two. The first four areas change their content as soon as you choose a different skill at the top — they always show this skill. The last two cut across all skills and are entry points into the whole.

3

Practice Questions

Skill-related

Questions with immediate feedback that explains why an answer holds up or leads into a trap. Two question types — which step or which category fits, and: which of the phrasings is the dysfunctional one. Three modes (current skill, all questions, learning game) feed a shared score with ranks.

4

Mindful Pause

Skill-related

A breathing exercise of about a minute in four beats — breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold, four seconds each — with a growing and shrinking orb, a phase display, a gong you can switch off and a closing bell.

What makes it particular: it is not a general timer. For each of the 38 skills, the title, subtitle and all four breathing phases are written specifically. For Radical Acceptance the phases are Reality → Hold → Let go → Emptiness, for Opposite Action Urge → Hold → Release → Emptiness. That is why the pause sits among the skill-related areas.

5

Emotion Compass

Cross-cutting

The entry point when you do not yet know the name of the skill — and the view the app starts in. You choose among ten basic emotions (anger, disgust, envy, fear, joy, jealousy, love, sadness, shame, guilt), refine your state and jump straight into the matching skill, into the Mindful Pause or into a lexicon entry.

Why the app starts with the emotion

Because the order in DBT is not arbitrary. A skill only works if it fits the state: someone under high tension cannot plan a conversation — there the body helps first, not the argument. That is why the beginning is not the skill list but the question of how you are doing right now.

It also means there is no “best” skill. There is the one that fits this moment — and that changes several times over the course of a day.

6

DBT Lexicon

Cross-cutting

41 terms to look up, filterable by module and searchable, with a glossary index for quick jumps. The entries reference each other, and every source line leads to its book. From Skill Training you get straight to the right place via “Read more about … in the lexicon”.

There is no server holding your sentences. So there is also no backup other than the one you made yourself.

Because nothing sits in a cloud, nothing ends up anywhere else on its own. That is the price of the commitment from Chapter 1 — and the reason this area exists.

Automatic: the running draft

What you type is saved continuously in your device's storage. A reload, a closed tab, a restart — the draft is back. You do not have to do anything for that; there is deliberately no save button.

Manual: the backup file

Options in the header opens Options & Backup. Three buttons sit at the bottom:

• Back up writes your current working state into a file that you put away yourself — on the device, in your cloud, on a stick. The app does not place it anywhere on its own.
• Load restores such a file, on another device too. What happens to existing data is stated in the dialogue before you confirm.
• Delete resets the workspace. Also with a confirmation prompt.

What you can switch off

The same dialogue holds the optional features as switches: custom situations, saved scripts, the skill images with Marcus, printing and copying, and the mood check-in. If you want the app lean, this is where you turn off what you do not need.

Why there is no cloud

What you write in here is, in case of doubt, health data — a conflict with your father, a hurt, an urge. Creating an account for that would mean putting exactly those sentences on someone else's servers. That was considered and rejected, not overlooked.

The flip side is yours to carry: two devices do not sync by themselves. Anyone working on both takes the backup file along.

The same app by two routes — with two separate sets of data. The bridge between them is a file.

Marcus'Mend exists twice: as an Android app from the Play Store and as a web app that can be installed in the browser. In content they are the same; what differs is where the app sits and how it updates.

There is no synchronisation between the browser and the Android app. Both versions keep separate sets of data; the way from one to the other is the backup file from Chapter 4.

Anyone who wants to know what lies beneath the surface can settle in: you do not need this chapter to use the app.

This chapter is for everyone who wants to know what sits behind the surface — clinically and technically. You do not need it to use the app.

The 38 skills

Marcus'Mend covers all four DBT modules: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. They are reachable through two entry points — the six acronym-based bundles and the menu of 32 individual skills, grouped there by module and alphabetical within.

The four-step sequence that explains the interface

The division into areas is not a menu design but the DBT sequence itself: recognise (Emotion Compass) → choose (skill selection) → apply (Skill Training on a scenario) → check (practice questions, checklists, saved manifests). That is why the app starts in the compass and not in a skill list.

Where the content comes from

Every step, every scenario and every lexicon entry is anchored in a primary source and names it visibly — with chapter, section and page, and with a marker showing whether the content comes from the manual or the workbook.

• Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual
• Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets
• Matthew McKay et al., The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

Technical

What “evidence-based” means here

DBT as a treatment has been studied in controlled trials — that applies to the treatment, not automatically to every app offering its content. Marcus'Mend therefore claims only what it can evidence: that the skills it conveys are those of DBT and are tied to the original sources. There is no efficacy study of this app, and none is claimed.