Managing Suicidal Patients Who Have Borderline Personality Disorder

Caring for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) is difficult; such patients often have emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, and poor adherence to treatments. Already at-risk for suicidal behaviors, these patients commonly have major depression, for which psychiatrists often prescribe selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) as a component of general clinical management.

An established treatment for suicidal behavior in patients with BPD is dialectical behavior therapy, which embeds distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness skills in a mindfulness approach during weekly individual and group sessions. To compare how these approaches affect suicidal behavior, researchers randomized 84 …