The prevalence of thought disorder in personality-disordered outpatients

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have been found to exhibit thought-disordered responses on unstructured psychological tests, but not on more structured tests. My study compared outpatients diagnosed with BPD to those who qualified for other personality disorders (OPD). Johnston and Holzman's (1979) Thought Disorder Index was applied to the Rorschach and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) protocols of two outpatient groups. The results of this study demonstrated that the BPD group produced a significantly greater number of thought-disordered responses on the Rorschach but not on the WAIS-R compared to the OPD group. Thus, the test pattern of individuals with BPD was confirmed by this study and successfully differentiated these patients from OPD outpatients. Further exploration of the degree of thought disorder on structured versus unstructured tests is suggested.