BACKGROUND Screening scales for bipolar disorder including the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) and Bipolar Spectrum Diagnostic Scale (BSDS) have been plagued by high false positive rates confounded by presence of borderline personality disorder. This study examined the accuracy of these scales for detecting bipolar disorder among patients referred for eating disorders and explored the possibi...

BACKGROUND Little is currently known about the presence and impact of personality disorder in adolescents who self-harm. AIMS To evaluate personality disorder in repeated self-harm in adolescence and its impact on self-harm psychopathology and adaptation outcomes over 1 year. METHOD A clinical referral sample (n = 366) of adolescents presenting with repeated self-harm aged 12-17 years, as p...

OBJECTIVE We evaluated the significance of purging behavior in the diagnosis of eating disorders through an objective assessment of eating disorder psychopathology including personality disorders. METHODS Subjects were 42 consecutive outpatients with eating disorders who visited the Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic at Tokai University Hospital (Kanagawa, Japan). Diagnosis of eating and personali...

Personality disorders are common and ubiquitous in all medical settings, so every medical practitioner will encounter them frequently. People with personality disorder have problems in interpersonal relationships but often attribute them wrongly to others. No clear threshold exists between types and degrees of personality dysfunction and its pathology is best classified by a single dimension, r...

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...

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...