These findings indicate that RF is associated with core aspects of personality pathology and capture clinically relevant phenomena in adult patients with PDs. Moreover, patients with different capacities for mentalization may need different kinds of therapeutic approaches.

Although borderline personality disorder (BPD) and schizophrenia (SZ) are notably different mental disorders, they share problems in social cognition—or understanding the feelings, intentions and thoughts of other people. To date no studies have directly compared the social cognitive abilities of individuals with these two disorders. In this study, the social cognitive subdomain theory of mind was investigated in women with BPD (n = 25), women with SZ (n = 25) and healthy women (n = 25). An ecologically valid video-based measure (Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition) was used. For the overall score, women with SZ performed markedly below both healthy women and women with BPD, whereas women with BPD did not perform significantly different compared to the healthy control group. A statistically significant error type × group interaction effect indicated that the groups differed with respect to kind of errors. Whereas women with BPD made mostly overmentalizing errors, women with SZ in addition committed undermentalizing errors. Our study suggests different magnitude and pattern of social cognitive problems in BPD and SZ.

Inpatients in long term psychosis treatment wards have alarmingly high cardiometabolic risk. Level of physical activity was associated with both psychiatric and somatic health. Focus on lifestyle and somatic health should be an integral part of the treatment for hospitalized SMI patients.

BackgroundAlthough psychotherapy is considered the treatment of choice for patients with personality disorders (PDs), there is no consensus about the optimal level of care for this group of patients. This study reports the results from the 6-year follow-up of the Ullevål Personality Project (UPP), a randomized clinical trial comparing outpatient individual psychotherapy with a long-term step-down treatment program that included a short-term day hospital treatment followed by combined group and individual psychotherapy.MethodsThe UPP included 113 patients with PDs. Outcome was evaluated after 8 months, 18 months, 3 years and 6 years and was based on a wide range of clinical measures, such as psychosocial functioning, interpersonal problems, symptom severity, and axis I and II diagnoses.ResultsAt the 6-year follow-up, there were no statistically significant differences in outcome between the treatment groups. Effect sizes ranged from medium to large for all outcome variables in both treatment arms. However, patients in the outpatient group had a marked decline in psychosocial functioning during the period between the 3- and 6-year follow-ups; while psychosocial functioning continued to improve in the step-down group during the same period. This difference between groups was statistically significant.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that both hospital-based long-term step-down treatment and long-term outpatient individual psychotherapy may improve symptoms and psychosocial functioning in poorly functioning PD patients. Social and interpersonal functioning continued to improve in the step-down group during the post-treatment phase, indicating that longer-term changes were stimulated during treatment.Trial registrationNCT00378248.