Borderline Personality Disorder and Public Health Ethics

An article in the May issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry - "The Emergence of a Generalist Model to Meet Public Health Needs for Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder" - shows how experts can move from a specialty niche to public health relevance. This isn't just a clinical act. It's also ethics in action!

Borderline Personality Disorder is a relatively common condition, said to affect 1%-2% of the population and to represent 15%-20% of psychiatric hospital admissions and 6% of primary care visits. People with the condition evince symptoms like: vulnerability to feeling abandoned; unstable relationships that oscillate between idealization and disenchantment; destructive impulsiveness; self-harm; difficulties controlling anger; transient psychotic episodes; and more. The condition takes a high toll on individuals, those involved with them, and the health professionals who try to help them.

In the past 25-30 years, three evidence-based forms of treatment have emerged:

• Dialectical behavior therapy. DBT involves a combination of weekly individual and group therapy that emphasizes understanding one's vulnerabilities and reaction patterns, combined with learning new self-management skills. 
• Mentalization-based treatment. This treatment is a variant of psychodynamic psychotherapy that focuses on better understanding of mental states in oneself and others, based on the hypothesis that patients with borderline personality disorder interpret and react to others in terms of their own fantasies, and that more realistic understanding will decrease their desperate emotional over-reactivity. Like DBT, mentalization-based therapy typically involves weekly individual and group sessions.
• Transference-focused psychotherapy. For this approach, twice weekly individual sessions are recommended. The treatment makes maximum use of the patient's reactions to the therapist as an avenue into modifying the internal structures that lead to the chaotic life pattern.

All three approaches can legitimately claim to have been validated. But all three require training and skill beyond the level of most mental health clinicians. Nine years ago Glen Gabbard, perhaps the leading educator in psychiatry, asked "Do all roads lead to Rome?" and suggested that the three techniques may reflect different ways of delivering common healing processes. In the just-published article that I cited above, John Gunderson, a leading researcher on BPD, builds on Gabbard's suggestion and offers a common-sense generalist model that emphasizes educating the patient about the condition, focusing on life outside of the office more than on the interaction between patient and therapist, integrating medication management, and selectively involving family and significant others.

I'm writing about this clinical issue in a venue devoted to health system ethics because the move from a specialist orientation to generalism embodies admirable public health ethics. Our U.S. health system tilts towards a specialist for every organ and condition. At its best, this approach cultivates deep clinical skills. But it also disarticulates the care of individuals into unrelated segments and mirrors the inequity of our wider society by providing a lot for the few and much less for the many.

When I did my residency in the 1960s, psychoanalytic training was regarded as the pinnacle of professional development. I valued the deep intellectual rigor of psychoanalysis, but couldn't see limiting my practice to a relatively small number of patients who would be seen 3-5 times per week, and who, by practical necessity, would have to be relatively affluent. 

Gunderson's article points in the direction I'd mapped out for myself at the start of my career. U.S. health care needs to strengthen its generalist orientation at the level of primary care and within specialties. Moving towards health insurance for all is the first step in correcting the moral failings of our health system. But the ultimate challenge is improving our commitment and capacity to provide excellent cost-effective care for the entire population. Gunderson's work illustrates what every segment of medicine needs to do.