This week's post is dedicated to something I see a lot at my internship: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I am interning in an inpatient psychiatric unit at a hospital. We are a short term crisis stabilization unit and we typically treat patients who are suicidal, have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or have substance abuse issues, although usually its some combination of those disorders. We also typically see people who have personality disorders. Personality disorders are not typically formally diagnosed on the unit, however, for case conceptualization purposes they are informally diagnosed as hypotheses for behavior in some patients that we treat.

 So far, during my time interning at the hospital I have worked with quite a few patients who were clearly borderline and quite a few more who more than likely were. Borderline patients are notorious for being difficult to work with because of their severe levels of emotional instability. In my experience, I begin to start questioning whether BPD is present in a patient I am working with if they have a long  history of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, a high degree of emotional lability, are female (although I have seen one male so far), have a history of cutting, a history of childhood abandonment or trauma (especially sexual abuse) or unstable interpersonal relationships. Many of these patients are also diagnosed with co-morbid major depression or other mood disorders.

I've found that watching videos helps me hone in on what to look for when trying to diagnose someone in a clinical setting and get a sense of what a disorder looks like, especially personality disorders. I've found a few for BPD that I've posted below that hopefully help you get a sense of what BPD is and what it looks like:

Borderline Personality Disorder
This is a great video by a psychiatrist describing BPD and what to look for in a clinical setting (Sorry, the audio isn't great!).

What is Borderline Personality Disorder? (Mental Health Guru)
This is another great video that describes BPD and goes a little more in depth into what is encompassed within the disorder.