Borderline Personality Disorder in Clinical Practice

Carolyn Zittel Conklin · Drew Westen

136 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Psychiatry

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Personality Disorders and Psychopathology Personality Traits and Psychology Bipolar Disorder and Treatment

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Most studies of borderline personality disorder have drawn patients from among hospital inpatients or outpatients. The aims of this study were to examine the nature of borderline personality disorder patients in everyday clinical practice and to use data from a sample of borderline personality disorder patients seen in the community to refine the borderline construct. METHOD: A random national sample of 117 experienced psychiatrists and psychologists from the membership registers of the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association provided data on a randomly selected patient with borderline personality disorder (N=90) or dysthymic disorder (N=27) from their practice. The clinicians provided data on axis I comorbidity, axis II comorbidity, and adaptive functioning, as well as a personality description of the patient using the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200 (SWAP-200) Q-sort, an instrument designed for assessment and taxonomic purposes. Analyses compared borderline personality disorder and dysthymic disorder groups on variables of interest and aggregated SWAP-200 items across all borderline personality disorder patients to create a composite portrait of borderline personality disorder as seen in the community. RESULTS: The borderline personality disorder sample strongly resembled previously studied borderline personality disorder samples with regard to comorbidity and adaptive functioning. However, the SWAP-200 painted a portrait of borderline personality disorder patients as having more distress and emotion dysregulation, compared to the DSM-IV description. CONCLUSIONS: Borderline personality disorder patients in research samples are highly similar to those seen in a cross-section of clinical practice. However, several studies have now replicated a portrait of borderline personality disorder symptoms that places greater weight than the DSM-IV description on the intense psychological pain of these patients and suggests candidate diagnostic criteria for DSM-V.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 136 citations exist upstream.

References

1994Meta-Analytic Procedures for Social Research.1995Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism 2001Psychological testing and psychological assessment: A review of evidence and issues.1990Childhood sexual and physical abuse in adult patients with borderline personality disorder 1981The diagnostic interview for borderline patients 1999Revising and Assessing Axis II, Part I: Developing a Clinically and Empirically Valid Assessment Method 1984The Chestnut Lodge Follow-up Study 2000Reliability and Validity of DSM-IV Axis V

Cited by

2011Developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and the current proposal of DSM-5 2006Psychological therapies including dialectical behaviour therapy for borderline personality disorder: a systematic review and preliminary economic evaluation 2011Identity disturbance in adolescence: Associations with borderline personality disorder 2009The impact of experiential avoidance on the reduction of depression in treatment for borderline personality disorder 2009Dissociation in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Detailed Look

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.