Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice

Providing good treatment to people with borderline personality disorder comes with many challenges: assessing safety, managing boundaries, selecting appropriate therapeutic interventions, and even making the correct diagnosis. Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, calling upon both clinical experience and a rigorous review of the research literature, provides a guide to each of these facets of patient care. For example, one chapter looks at the diagnostic boundaries of borderline personality disorder and offers the reader several clear questions to help distinguish borderline personality disorder from other conditions. A chapter on pharmacotherapy reveals the significant gap between the common clinical practice of polypharmacy for people with borderline personality disorder and the current research base that offers only limited evidence for the effectiveness of single medications. The most recent research regarding cognitive and psychodynamic therapies is also summarized, and the author offers his own view of which elements of therapy are particularly critical to success. Later chapters focus on specific guidelines for management, discuss suicidality and hospitalization, and advise the reader about approaching common problems in therapy.

This book is written by one of the foremost experts in borderline personality disorder. Joel Paris, M.D., a research associate at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and professor at McGill University, has enriched the field's knowledge regarding diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of this complex disorder, and this book is yet another important contribution.

Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder is written with clarity and offers sophisticated and advanced analysis that will be instructive to anyone offering treatment to persons with this disorder, regardless of the clinician's level of experience. The summary of research is concisely written in a straightforward and clinically applicable manner. When he offers his own observations about a research debate, Dr. Paris clearly delineates his opinions from the evidence base. Throughout, the author offers the field's best practices for diagnosis and care as well as his own expertise. Case examples illustrate key points, and each chapter concludes with a bulleted list of clinical implications. In all, this is an excellent resource, offering a balance of science, wisdom, and insight designed to improve the treatment of those affected by borderline personality disorder.

The reviewer reports no competing interests.