Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
While the DSM-IV lists tens categories of personality disorder, borderline personality disorder (BPD) is the one most frequently experienced in clinical practice. Roughly ten percent of the population suffers from BPD, individuals who suffer an emotional roller-coaster that motivates impulsive and self-destructive behaviors (Paris, 1996). Often, those with BPD come to the attention of a psychiatrist because of suicidal impulses, ideation or actual attempts. BPD originates in youth and affects young individuals but seems to ameliorate with age as most individuals with BPD tend to function more successfully in their thirties and forties. Nearly four out of five individuals whose personality is borderline are women, as eighty percent of patients are female (Paris, 1996). The causes of BPD are multidimensional with a review of the literature seeming to draw a consensus that its development includes factors across a socio-psycho-biogenetic perspective. While many researchers stress biogenetic factors as predominant, just as many others conclude it is environmental and social learning that most greatly impact the development of the disorder. Nearly all agree the disorder is caused by a combination or overlap of causal dimensions. Stone (1988; in Paris, 1993) supports the multidimensional approach in the development of BPD, “BPD appears to be the final common pathway of many influences: hereditary, constitutional, organic-traumatic, neurologic (including attention-deficit disorder), and environmental, the latter usually in the form of parental cruelty, extreme neglect, or incest” (p. 97). This analysis will primarily focus on the causes of BPD across two dimensions, biology and genetics and environment.
The Causes of BPD: Biology & Genetics
The Allport’s Trait Approach is one perspective on personality formation and the biological and genetic factors involved in BPD can be lin...