Borderline Personality Disorder Case Study

In the United States, 2.7% of adults meet the criteria for borderline personality disorder. BPD is a serious psychiatric disorder characterized by impulsivity, suicidal thoughts, difficulties regulating emotion, and unstable interpersonal relationships. This disorder is difficult to diagnose, and even more difficult to treat. Treatment usually consists of psychotherapeutic and medical treatments which can prove to be expensive, lengthy, and may not always work. In recent years, researchers have tried to find better solutions for treatment by looking at the cause of BPD and attempting to narrow it down to one intrinsic root. This proves to be especially difficult since BPD is a comorbid disorder, being intermingled with several Axis I disorders. To single out the issue behind BPD researchers started focusing on Autobiographical memories (AM); personal memories that …show more content…
Rosenbach and Renneberg, (2015) and Reid and Startup (2010) focused on four groups of people, individuals with no mental health issues, diagnosed depression, diagnosed BPD, and those individuals with BPD and comorbid depression, and how they recalled AM. Rosenbach and Renneberg (2015) found that depressed patients received fewer specific memories than the control group, and those with BPD did not differ from the control group at all. This accompanied with Reid & Startup’s (2010) finding that no difference was presented between those individuals with BPD and those with BPD comorbid Depression put us at once again, no correlation between BPD and issues with AM. However, they did notice that depressed patients did have issues with AM, meaning it is quite possible that depressed patients aren’t remembering the positive life events, whereas BPD and BPD comorbid depressed patients do not have those positive life events to recall (Rosenbach & Renneberg