Borderline Personality Disorder, Suicidality, and PTSD: How Do They Interact?

Both patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experience emotional dysregulation, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors are common. To examine the interactions of BPD and PTSD in patients with suicidality, researchers assessed the clinical characteristics of 53 women with both BPD and PTSD and 41 women with BPD but without PTSD. All patients had both recent and repeated suicidal or self-injurious behavior (≥2 intentional acts within 5 years and ≥1 in the past year).

Patients with both BPD and PTSD showed higher rates of several axis I disorders (panic disorder, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder) than BPD patients without PTSD, and they reported greater emotional dysre…