Editorial: The Developmental Science of Borderline Personality Disorder

In a seminal review article on borderline personality disorder (BPD) for the American Journal of Psychiatry, John Gunderson once made the allusion that "borderline personality disorder is to psychiatry what psychiatry is to medicine," suggesting that the condition is frequently neglected, even among mental health professionals and researchers.¹ For instance, BPD-related research received less than one-tenth of the US National Institutes of Health funding compared to bipolar disorder research, despite sharing similar rates of prevalence, impairment, and mortality.² Along those lines, one could argue that borderline personality features in adolescence share the same hierarchical relationship with their counterparts in adults, being even more stigmatized and overlooked, even in the child and adolescent psychiatry community. Accordingly, only 1 of 4 randomized trials with psychosocial interventions for BPD were conducted in youth.^3,4.