Specific Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder Linked to Suicide Risk

Certain symptoms of borderline personality disorder —especially chronic feelings of emptiness, fear of abandonment, and disturbances in one’s sense of identity—appear to be significantly associated with suicide attempts, according to areport published today inJAMA Psychiatry.“[T]he results of this study show the importance of assessing and targeting identity disturbance, abandonment, and emptiness in patients with BPD [borderline personality disorder] when considering suicide prevention, symptoms that may often be overshadowed by affective or behavioral features of BP D [borderline personality disorder],” wrote Shirley Yen, Ph.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and colleagues.Yen and colleagues analyzed data from the Collaborative Longitudinal Study of Personality Disorders, a multisite, prospective study of adults with at least one of four personality disorders (schizotypal, borderline, avoidant, and obsessive compulsive) and a comparison group of adults with major depressive disorder. They looked at the occurrence of suicide attempts in both groups over a 10-year period and examined the associations between specific symptoms and suicide attempts.Of all disorders, borderline personality disorder emerged as the most robust factor associated with suicide attempts, even after controlling for demographic and clinical factors (such as childhood sexual abuse, alcohol use disorder, substance use disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder).Among the spe...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: borderline personality disorder emptiness feeling of abandonment identity disturbance JAMA Psychiatry suicide suicide attempts suicide prevention Source Type: research