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Bipolar disorders (BDs) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are distinctive illnesses, but they also share several phenomenological features. Indeed, psychiatric residents in my teaching clinic have traditionally referred to some of these patients, whose predominating symptoms involve these shared features, as “border–polar.” Studies suggest that as many as 22% of patients with BPD also meet criteria for BD. Investigators examined retrospectively collected cross-sectional data from a large international study of patients with depression to ascertain the relationships between these conditions.
Of 5635 depressed patients evaluated, 9.3% met criteria for BPD. In analyses using different criteria (i.e., several modifications of DSM-IV crit…