Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:34:13.724Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘Borderline Personality’: Diagnostic Attitudes at the Maudsley Hospital

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Mark Berelowitz
Affiliation:
The Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ, UK

Summary

About a quarter of the psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital use the diagnosis of ‘borderline’ personality. The description of the borderline patient obtained in this study does not overlap with any existing ICD personality disorder but has characteristics of the schizoid, paranoid, hysteric, explosive, anankastic and antisocial personalitities. The item that discriminated best between borderlines and controls was ‘brief, unsystematized, psychotic episodes', which is not included in the DSM-III definitions of borderline diagnoses. Items of the DSM-III ‘schizotypal’ set—e.g. ‘suspiciousness' and ‘ideas of reference'—discriminated better between borderline cases and controls, whereas items of the DSM-III ‘borderline personality’ set—e.g. ‘impulsivity’ or ‘unpredictability'— scored more frequently in both groups. These are similar to American findings.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychiatric Association (1980) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.Google Scholar
Gunderson, J. G., Kolb, J. E. & Austin, V. (1981) The diagnostic interview for borderline patients. American Journal of Psychiatry, 138, 896903.Google ScholarPubMed
Kernberg, O. (1967) Borderline personality organisation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 15, 641–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kety, S. S., Rosenthal, D., Wender, P. H. & Schulsinger, F. (1968) The types and prevalence of mental illness in the biological and adoptive families of adopted schizophrenics. In The Transmission of Schizophrenia (ed. D. Rosenthal and S. S. Kety), pp. 345–62. New York: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Khouri, P. P., Haier, R. J., Rieder, R. O. & Rosenthal, D. (1980) A symptom schedule for the diagnosis of borderline schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 140–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J., Sines, L., Martin, K., Lari, S., Pyle, R. & Zander, J. (1981) Borderline personality disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 38, 1021–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kroll, J., Carey, K., Sines, L. & Roth, M. (1982) Are there borderlines in Britain? Archives of General Psychiatry, 39, 60–3.Google Scholar
Macaskill, N. D. & Macaskill, A. (1981) The use of the term ‘Borderline Patient’ by Scottish psychiatrists: a preliminary survey. British Journal of Psychiatry, 139, 397–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rey, J. H. (1979) Schizoid phenomena in the borderline. In Advances in Psychotherapy of the Borderline Patient (ed. J. Le Boit and A. Capponi). New York and London: Jason Aronson.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, H. (1979) Difficulties in the psychoanalytic treatment of borderline patients. In Advances in Pyschotherapy of the Borderline Patient (ed. J. Le Boit and A. Capponi). New York and London: Jason Aronson.Google Scholar
Spitzer, R. L., Endicott, J. & Gibbon, M. (1979) Crossing the border into borderline personality and borderline schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 36, 1724.Google Scholar
Stern, A. (1938) Psychoanalytic investigation of and therapy in the borderline group of neuroses. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7, 467–89.Google Scholar
Stone, M. H. (1980) The Borderline Syndromes. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
World Health Organisation (1978) Mental Disorders: Glossary and Guide to their Classification in Accordance with the Ninth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Geneva: World Health Organisation.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.