Diagnostic Efficiency of Borderline Personality Disorder Criteria in Hospitalized Adolescents: Comparison With Hospitalized Adults

Abstract

In hospitalized patients, borderline personality disorder and its symptoms appear to be as frequent for adolescents as for adults. Despite these surface similarities between groups with respect to symptom patterns, several differences were found at the level of the diagnostic efficiency for individual borderline personality disorder criteria. These differences may shed light on the nature of borderline psychopathology during adolescence.

If It Looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck: Evaluating the Validity of Borderline Personality Disorder in Adolescents

“…In addition, items demonstrated good discrimination and difficulty parameters. The most difficult items included abandonment fears and suicidal behavior; this finding converges with research in adults that has demonstrated that abandonment fears are the least commonly exhibited BPD symptom (22,28) and that suicidal behaviors are uncommon among young children (29). With regard to measurement equivalence across gender, although five criteria demonstrated differential item functioning, this balanced out at the level of the total set of the nine DSM-IV BPD criteria, which suggests that the use of the full nine criteria is psychometrically valid and advisable.…”

Reasons for Non-Suicidal Self-Harm in Adult Male Offenders With and Without Borderline Personality Traits

“…Second, the study focused on lifetime self-harm rather than self-harm within the prison because our interest was in the stable personality traits of this sample (which are likely to have been present prior to incarceration as they develop in early adolescence/early adulthood e.g., Becker, Grilo, Edell & McGlashan, 2002), that might explain the endorsement of specific functions. As a result, generalisation of the findings to a specific observation period (e.g., 1-month prevalence, or past 12 months) either in our outside of the prison is not possible, and it means that we cannot be sure whether some self-harm occurred prior to criminal activity.…”

L’enfant borderline en devenir II : validation préliminaire de l’Échelle de traits de personnalité limite pour enfants

“…Le départ des personnes significatives, même momentané, apparaît alors particulièrement menaçant puisque sans l'autre, il y a une perte des ancrages internes (Westen et al, 2011). La peur de l'abandon est un élément fondamental de la psychopathologie limite (Goldman, D'Angelo, DeMaso et o 3 Mezzacappa, 1992) qui a d'ailleurs été identifié comme le symptôme ayant la plus grande validité prédictive d'un diagnostic de TPL chez les adolescents (Becker, Grilo, Edell et McGlashan, 2002).…”