Borderline Personality Disorder,  Treatment

Borderline Personality Disorder: Treatment Resistance Reconsidered

A major longitudinal study of BPD and other personality disorders with 16 years of follow-up showed that virtually all subjects with BPD achieve sustained remission for at least 2 years, and 78% sustain remission for 8 years.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Treatment Resistance Reconsidered

November 27, 2017 | Special Reports, Borderline Personality, Psychopharmacology
By Lois W. Choi-kain, MD, Ethan I. Glasserman, and Ellen F. Finch

The concept of treatment resistance deserves reconsideration. Originally formulated in psychoanalytic terms, resistance in treatment referred to the inevitable ways patients unconsciously express their psychology in terms of defense mechanisms and transference enactment. This form of resistance provides a window into the patient’s problems; therefore, it is a major focus of the inquiry and intervention. Modern psychiatry defines treatment resistance as a lack of response to adequate treatment. Both conceptualizations locate treatment resistance within the patient, rather than as a product of limited, underdeveloped, and ineffective treatments. As a result, the term “treatment resistant” can fuel views of patients as “oppositional” and recalcitrant, instead of expectably symptomatic.

Treatment resistance is highly prevalent across most psychiatric disorders—even in common diagnoses generally associated with positive outcomes, such as depression. There are many more obstacles to effective treatment (Figure 1) than the patient’s psychological resistance alone. Identification of specific factors that diminish treatment response may provide more useful points of intervention than the label of treatment resistance.

Comorbid disorders contribute to poor treatment response. Treatment guidelines are often based on a false assumption that patients present with single disorders that respond to specific evidence-based treatments. Regardless of increasing attention to problems of comorbidity, guidelines for combining and prioritizing the treatment of different diagnoses remain largely underdeveloped.

Comorbid personality disorders complicate treatment. Over 50% of patients in specialized psychiatric settings have personality disorders.1 These patients are more likely to face social adversity, suffer from complex comorbidities, and drop out of treatment or not adhere to medication regimens—all of which contribute to an increased risk of a lack of response to treatment. The presence of a personality disorder, particularly borderline, predicts persistence of anxiety and substance use disorders as well as poorer outcomes in depressive disorders. Moreover, 13% of those who complete suicide have personality disorders.2

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