Attitudes of Mental Health Staff Toward Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder: An Italian Cross-Sectional Multisite Study.

Negative attitudes toward borderline personality disorder (BPD) can present a barrier to those seeking care. We explored caring attitudes toward BPD among 860 mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social health educators, nurses, and social workers. The results showed that social workers and nurses scored significantly lower on caring attitudes than psychiatrists, social health educators, and psychologists. Our analysis showed that the more BPD patients treated in the past year, more years of experience in mental health, and having prior BPD training were positively associated with caring attitudes scores. For all professional subgroups, except for social health educators, the caring attitudes score is higher in those who have had prior BPD training, and for professionals with low and medium level of experience in mental health. This result shows that training on BPD should target less experienced clinicians and those professional groups who had less opportunity to receive such education.

A Clinical Trial of a Psychoeducation Group Intervention for Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to assess the impact of a 6-session psychoeducational group (PEG) intervention for borderline personality disorder (BPD) in an underserved community-based outpatient setting. METHODS: The study was conducted between July 2015 and January 2017. Of 96 outpatients who met DSM-IV criteria for BPD, the first 48 received the experimental treatment, whereas the next 48 were assigned to a wait list. All received non-intensive treatment as usual. The primary outcome measure, the Zanarini Rating Scale for DSM-IV Borderline Personality Disorder (ZAN-BPD), was administered at baseline, at the end of treatment, and 2 months after the end of treatment. RESULTS: The PEG intervention was associated with a significant improvement on all sectors of BPD (P < .001). Improvements were greater for the PEG on all sectors except impulsivity. Benefits remained stable during 2-month follow-up. The PEG intervention had a large effect size (Cohen d = -1.16), whereas the wait list effect size was small (Cohen d = -0.18). The between-arms effect size was 0.80 after treatment and 0.90 at follow-up. With full response defined as a decrease of ≥ 50% from baseline in ZAN-BPD total score, 22 patients (46%) in the psychoeducation group and 3 (6%) in the wait list group were considered full responders. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that a PEG intervention can be an effective treatment for patients with BPD. The overall cost benefits of group interventions and the the applicability of a PEG intervention to underserved patients demonstrate its potential to address significant public health needs.