Quality of Depressive Experience in Borderline Personality Disorder and Major Depression: When Depression is Not Just Depression

Abstract

Clinicians and theorists have argued that the depression characteristic of borderline patients is phenomenologically distinct from that of other unipolar depressives. In the present study, the quality of depressive experience was examined in borderline patients with (n = 16) and without (n = 17) major depression as compared with nonborderline major depressives (n = 14). In support of the hypothesis, borderlines with and without major depression evidenced a qualitatively distinct, interpersonally focused “borderline depression,” even controlling for severity of depression. Phenomenologically, this borderline depression is characterized by emptiness, loneliness, desperation in relation to attachment figures, and labile, diffuse negative affectivity.