Borderline Personality Disorder

By Martin Brüne. Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, 2016

1,861 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ (BPD) refers to a psychiatric syndrome that is characterized by emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, risk-taking behavior, irritability, feelings of emptiness, self-injury and fear of abandonment, as well as unstable interpersonal relationships. BPD is not only common in psychiatric populations but also more prevalent in the general community than previously thought, and thus represents an important public health issue. In contrast to most psychiatric disorders, some symptoms associated with BPD may improve over time, even without therapy, though impaired social functioning and interpersonal disturbances in close relationships often persist. Another counterintuitive and insufficiently resolved question is why depressive symptoms and risk-taking behaviors can occur simultaneously in the same individual. Moreover, there is an ongoing debate about the nosological position of BPD, which impacts on research regarding sex differences in clinical presentation and patterns of comorbidity. In this review, it is argued that many features of BPD may be conceptualized within an evolutionary framework, namely behavioral ecology. According to Life History Theory, BPD reflects a pathological extreme or distortion of a behavioral ‘strategy’ which unconsciously aims at immediate exploitation of resources, both interpersonal and material, based on predictions shaped by early developmental experiences. Such a view is consistent with standard medical conceptualizations of BPD, but goes beyond classic ‘deficit’-oriented models, which may have profound implications for therapeutic approaches.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/841030e1cae5d20e44239abd8031740d0ee89957

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In Clinical Psychology

1. S. Bachmann
2. L. Marácz
3. F. Grin
4. N. Pokorn

Citations in the corpus

• Epidemiology of Suicide and the Psychiatric Perspective (2018, background): “In addition, chronic suicidality poses a major problem for therapists in borderline personality disorder patients [155,158,159].”
• Chapter 1. General introduction (2015, positive): “Patient perspectives on self-harm Studies of patients’ own experiences with self-harm reveal that they have several reasons for harming themselves [5, 19-27]: (1) affect regulation is mentioned most by patients: the self-harm is used to alleviate acute negative affect or affective arousal.”