Borderline Personality Disorder PDF

Preface

orderline personality disorder (BPD) is both a common and very serious psychiatric disorder. Recent studies have found that about 2% of American adults meet criteria for BPD. Perhaps more troubling is the fact that this diagnosis is associated with high levels of mental health service utilization, psychosocial impairment, and subjective distress.

The disorder was first described by Adolph Stern in 1938, but it did not enter the official nomenclature of the American Psychiatric Association until 1980. In the introductory chapter on History of the Concept, we will review the many psychoanalytic concepts that were used during the 1950s and 1960s to describe borderline patients (e.g., psychotic character, as-if personality). The chapter will also review the efforts of descriptive psychiatry to conceptualize BPD as a subsyndromal version of first schizophrenia, then mood disorders, impulse spectrum disorders, and finally, traumatic disorders.