Study of Hallucinations in Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder

Study of Prevalence and Characteristics of Hallucinations in Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder

Hallucinations in borderline personality disorder are a frequent an serious trouble which have an important impact in patients lives. Despite this, they are often ignored by nursing staff, and are not an important criteria in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) 5 and Classification Internationale des maladies (CIM-10). The main objective of our study is to assess the prevalence of this trouble in borderline personality disorder (BPD) population, and to characterize the hallucinations in order to compare our results with those of international studies.

The borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a very common personality disorder which concerns about 1.35% of total population. It is characterized by an affective, emotional, social and professional instability and an important association with comorbidities like mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, addictive problems and suicide mortality. Hallucinations seem to be frequent in this personality disorder, but are not often taken in consideration by nursing staff because of massive need of attention of this kind of patient. At this moment there is no study of prevalence of this trouble in France in free environment. In the same way, there is no qualitative study about hallucinations. That is why we can do a lot of progress in this part of psychiatry.

This research is an observational study of descriptive type. Patients will be recruited in the different services. In this study, patients will have to pass different questionnaires (DIB-R, DES II, THQ, PCL-S, PSAS, qualitative questionnaire) in order to compare the characteristics between BDL patients with and without hallucinations.

For that, the investigator will meet each patient twice, after information by the medical staff of the service and consent. During the first meeting, the investigator will get the socio-demographic characteristics, the verification of inclusion and non-inclusion criteria, and the DIB-R questionnaire to know if the patient has really BPD and hallucinations or not. This is the same interview for all patients. During the second meeting, we will look for dissociative symptoms with DES II questionnaire, then traumatic symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder with THQ and PCL-S. The PSAS and qualitative questionnaire will be used for BPD patients with hallucinations.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Patient aged 18 and under 75
• Patient with borderline personality disorder (formerly or newly diagnosed diagnosis)
• Patient having given his opposition to his participation in research

Exclusion Criteria:

• Schizophrenia
• Major depressive episode characterized in progress
• Manic or hypomanic episode in progress
• History of head trauma
• Stroke, Parkinson's disease, dementia
• Autism
• Mental retardation
• Patient under the age of 75
• Patient who does not read or speak French
• Patient unable to give consent (includes protected persons: guardianship, trusteeship)
• Incarcerated patient