Psychosis in Borderline Patients with Depression

Abstract

The authors compared psychotic symptoms in 24 prospectively identified borderline inpatients who met criteria for major depressive disorder with 20 major depressive disorder nonborderline controls. They found significantly more borderline subjects with dissociative phenomena, but there were few instances of true psychotic symptoms, even brief ones, in either of the groups. The dissociative episodes occurred primarily in women, and an etiology for the episodes is proposed. These results suggest that the criterion “brief or prolonged altered experiences of reality” rather than “brief psychosis” be considered as a prototypic borderline symptom.