Borderline Personality Disorder as a Predictor of Drug Use Variety: Cognitive Vs. Affective Mechanisms

ABSTRACT

Borderline personality disorder has been identified as a risk factor for polydrug use. Despite this, there remains a lack of understanding of which characteristics of the disorder provide the mechanisms for this relationship. This study examined a set of constructs as mechanisms explaining the borderline personality disorder-polydrug use relationship that are divided into affective and cognitive categories. The Pathways to Desistance data were used in analyses. Generalized structural equation modeling was used to examine the direct relationship between borderline personality disorder and test for attenuation of this direct effect. A bootstrap resampling process was used to estimate standard errors utilized to specify specific and total indirect effects of mechanism variables and their significance level. Results indicated that greater symptom severity of borderline personality disorder predicted increased drug use variety. This relationship was attenuated by 70% when hypothesized mechanisms were included and became nonsignificant. It appeared that this attenuation was mainly due to sensation-seeking. Findings indicate that interventions for individuals suffering from borderline personality disorder with polydrug use issues may find utility in structuring programming around mitigating sensation-seeking.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderline personality disorder
• emotion regulation
• depression
• dual systems model
• polydrug use

Code availability

Upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

Data available via ICPSR.

Authors contributions

Sole author responsible for all work.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.