Perspectives on person-centred care for borderline personality disorder: a critical research agenda

ABSTRACT

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a highly contentious psychiatric diagnosis with ongoing tensions over nomenclature, aetiology and treatment recommendations. This article examines a number of these tensions and assesses how greater attention to the voices of people living with BPD may help inform the delivery of new modes of person-centred care. To this end, we present a critical social science research agenda for investigating the experiences, social contexts and support needs of people living with BPD. We canvass issues pertaining to the diagnosis of BPD (including its name), the strongly gendered dimensions of BPD, and the pressing need to improve support for people living with this condition. Throughout our analysis, we indicate how critical interdisciplinary inquiry may drive new responses to these challenges. Our analysis is illustrated with reference to experiences of BPD recounted in two Australia-wide surveys conducted in 2011 and 2017. We argue that greater progress towards person-centred care requires novel forms of evidence grounded in critical social inquiry into experiences of treatment and support among people living with BPD, and the varied social, cultural and political contexts underpinning these experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderline personality disorder
• mental health
• critical social inquiry
• person-centred care

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Private Mental Health Consumer Carer Network (Australia) Ltd and its executive chair, Ms Janne McMahon OAM, for supporting this article by providing deidentified data from their surveys for secondary analysis. Thanks also to the reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Cameron Duff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9792-0385

Jacinthe Flore http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3136-9236

Felicity Callard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5350-1963