What are the causes of borderline personality disorder?
I think there’s two schools of thought. There’s definitely a group of people who feel that borderline personality disorder has some biological basis to it or genetic component. It is more common in people with first degree relatives that have borderline. Again, I don’t think that this is necessarily means that a genetic component. Probably one of the best ways to become a broderline is to get raised by one. So that family, a higher family incidence might represent a learned behavior. There’s also another school of thought that this is developmental. In other words, there’s a lot of literature devoted to examining the developmental deficiencies in parenting that patients with borderline personality received or, actually, failed to receive. It is interesting to note that a large number of these patients have childhood histories of sexual abuse, physical abuse and or neglect. The degree to which that is causative in terms of the personality disorder is unknown at this time.
