Borderline Personality

What do functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging findings reveal about the neurobiology of borderline personality disorder? Take the quiz and learn more.

Do personality disorders get a bad rap? Take the quiz and learn more.

While treatment of bipolar disorder challenging , the notion that it is treatment resistant is contradicted by longitudinal and treatment research that indicates high rates of remission over time, moderate rates of recovery, and significant response to structured treatments tailored to symptoms.

The authors describe an alternative model for BPD diagnosis that is dimensional in nature and requires fulfillment of 4 of 7 personality traits.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma reveals a clear distinction between the 2 conditions.

Here's what's new in personality disorders: DBT treatment, DSM-5 criteria, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personalities, and mentalization-based treatments.

There is more to BPD than meets the eye. A complex interaction exists between environmental, anatomical, functional, genetic, and epigenetic factors.

MBT presents a compromise to bridge the valuable history of psychoanalytic ideas to both modern psychiatric research as well as present public health needs and practice.

An exploration topics that are relevant to most clinicians who work with patients with personality disorders.

Patients with borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder (or both) can feel entitled to special treatment and often seek only approving forms of attention from those who treat them.

Borderline personality disorder typically coexists with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Symptoms of these conditions may lead the clinician to miss the diagnosis of personality disorder entirely. Careful diagnosis of BPD and comorbid disorders is the first step.

Are patients with borderline personality disorder at a significantly increased risk for suicide when in the angry victim state? This question and more in this quiz.

A study of veterans at risk for suicide showed that single attempters did not differ from multiple attempters on any variable except a history of childhood physical abuse.

Neural underpinnings and symptom presentation in borderline personality disorder might explain similarities and differences in this symptom domain across the spectrum of personality disorders as well as in other disorders associated with impulsive symptoms.

BPD appears to be a neurodevelopmental disorder, influenced by the person’s genetics and brain development and shaped by early environment, including attachment and traumatic experiences.

Staying empathic and keeping the conflict within the patient instead of between the patient and health care provider, is a key to successful management.

Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope is one in a series being published by Johns Hopkins University Press on major psychiatric disorders.

Historically, borderline patients were considered “help-rejecting complainers.” Clinicians should actively treat both mood/anxiety symptoms and BPD symptoms.

Since the inclusion of the borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis in DSM, there have been multiple efforts to recast the disorder as part of an Axis I illness category. While the initial focus was on the schizophrenia spectrum, more recent authors have attempted to link BPD to mood disorders.

Two randomized controlled trials have shown the Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving (STEPPS) program to be effective in reducing the intensity of core aspects of borderline personality disorder (BPD), Dr Donald Black and social worker Nancee Blum announced at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association held recently in San Francisco. Black summarized, “Data from several studies show that STEPPS reduced global severity as rated by clinicians and patients, borderline personality disorder symptoms, and depressive symptoms.”

Success with new approaches to the psychotherapeutic treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and other DSM-IV personality disorders has been reported in several studies recently, raising hopes that an intractable set of illnesses may not be as hopeless as once thought.

In working with adolescents, mental health care professionals often draw on their own developmental experiences to help guide their patients; however, nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is not likely to be a personal experience that psychiatrists can often draw on.

DVD Aims to Educate Clinicians, Patients on Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) and substance use disorder (SUD) often co-occur. Comorbid BPD and SUD is related to a variety of severe adverse outcomes.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious illness involving multiple symptoms and mal adaptive behaviors. According to DSM-IV, “the essential feature of borderline personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects” (p. 650). This pervasive pattern of instability also applies to behaviors that are impulsive and potentially damaging, including excessive spending, sexual promiscuity, reckless driving, binge eating, and substance misuse.

DSM-IV-TR emphasizes that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show a "instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," and any five out of nine listed criteria must be present for the diagnosis to be made.

After the recent decade of the brain and in the present era of evidence-based practice, psychoanalytic treatment of personality disorder is being challenged.

Splitting, archetypally imbedded in a patient's psychic structure, acts as a powerful unconscious force to protect against the ego's perception of dangerous anxiety and intense affects. Rather than providing real protection, splitting leads to destructive behavior and turmoil in patients' lives.

Suicidality in patients with borderline personality disorder is chronic. It is important to distinguish these patients from those with classic mood disorders, who are suicidal only when acutely depressed.

This article focuses on data concerning the efficacy of mood stabilizers in the treatment of BPD.