[Clinical diagnosis and standardized evaluation of borderline personality: preliminary report]

A sample of 36 patients considered by French clinicians as suffering from a borderline personality disorder was evaluated using the International Personality Disorder Examination, the Diagnostic Interview for Borderline-Revised, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. First, global descriptive analysis of the sample elicited the socio-demographic and standard clinical characteristics of the borderline individuals. After diagnostic evaluation, the sample appeared to be quite homogeneous with 25 of the 36 patients evaluated (69.5%) being defined as borderline by two of the three diagnostic systems: ICD 10, DSM III-R and Gunderson (15/36 = 41.5% of patients were defined as borderline by all three systems). It is the types of BL personality co-diagnoses which differentiated the BL subjects in the sample from those classically described in the international literature, since the most frequent personalities were the Dependent and Avoiding ones, not the Antisocial, Histrionic, Narcissistic or Schizotypic personalities of the DSM III-R. ICD 10 elicited the same significant prevalence of Anxious and Dependent personalities. Lastly, the patients diagnosed as borderline both by clinicians and by all diagnostic systems (forming the sample "core") were compared with the rest of the sample with regard to socio-demographic, clinical and diagnostic characteristics. A few hypotheses are proposed on the type of variables that may permit to discriminate between these two types of patients.