OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of axis I disorders among patients with borderline personality disorder over 6 years of prospective follow-up. METHOD A semistructured interview of demonstrated reliability was used to assess presence or absence of comorbid axis I disorders in 290 patients who met Revised Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines criteria and DSM-III...

Individuals serologically positive for the chronic infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (TG) display certain personality traits differently from uninfected individuals. Experimental data in mice demonstrate that TG infection modulates behaviour. However, psychiatric patients with a personality disorder have not yet been investigated systematically. In our sample containing 896 psychiat...

BACKGROUND There is significant symptomatic overlap between diagnostic criteria for adjustment disorder and depressive episode, commonly leading to diagnostic difficulty. Our aim was to clarify the role of personality in making this distinction. METHODS We performed detailed assessments of features of personality disorder, depressive symptoms, social function, social support, life-threatening...

The aim of this study is to estimate the frequency of personality disorders in patients with recurrent unipolar or bipolar affective disorders and the possible relationship of the categorical model with two dynamic psychopathological configurations. Forty-eight patients were studied using semi-structured interviews for assessing Axis I and Axis II disorders. We found that approximately 70% of p...

Despite a general consensus that dimensional models are superior to the categorical representations of personality disorders in DSM-IV, proposals for how to depict personality pathology dimensions vary substantially. One important question involves how to separate clinical severity from the style of expression through which personality pathology manifests. This study empirically distinguished s...

Consistent with the "scar hypothesis", according to which mood depression might impact personality, we examined the effect of unipolar and hypomanic mood disturbances on cluster B (i.e., narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline) personality disorder features. Data from 113 suicidal young adults were utilized, and cross-lagged associations between unipolar and hypomanic mood disturbances and clu...

Few areas of psychiatric investigation have seen progress as radical as in the field of personality disorder, particularly the treatment of borderline personality disorder. The advance in the understanding of borderline personality disorder has been influenced by two developments: (a) the increasing recognition that the disorder has a far more benign course than previously thought; and (b) the ...

Until recently, few cases of multiple personality disorder were diagnosed in children. Today, the number of cases is increasing at an alarming rate and appears to be most closely associated with repeated sexual and physical abuse. This paper focuses on reports of childhood multiple personality disorder in the literature, the etiology of this disorder, family dynamics, the differences between ch...

Premorbid personality characteristics could have a pathoplastic effect on behavioral symptoms and personality changes related to neurodegenerative diseases. Patients with personality disorders, in particular of the dramatic cluster, may present functional frontolimbic abnormalities. May these neurobiological vulnerabilities linked to a premorbid personality disorder predispose or represent a ri...