Levels of personality organization and psychopathology among drug abusers in Sweden

In a case-finding sample of 1,824 drug abusers in the greater Stockholm area, personality organization (PO), according to Kernberg's theory, was assessed by using a standardized questionnaire, with the clients' contact persons as informants. Twenty percent of the sample were diagnosed as psychotic PO (PPO), 40% had a clear borderline PO (BPO), and 40% a high BPO or a neurotic PO (NPO). This distribution agreed closely with that found in a comparison sample of social service clients. However, in the NPO and BPO groups, the mean scores were higher for the social service clients than for the abusers. A clustering into nine sub-clusters revealed interesting differences within each PO.