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Regardless of how we think about borderline personality disorder as a construct, we clinicians know what it is like to sit down with someone and feel a patient’s chronic emptiness, that desperate reaching for help or vigorous rejection of it. Calling this a “personality disorder” has always struck me as a wrong public relations maneuver for psychiatry, basically saying, “We, who are so normal, will call you personality disordered.” However, is there a connection between maternal prenatal life stresses and later acquiring that diagnosis in the offspring? After all, borderlinity is more of an attachment problem than a prenatal one.
Here is how the authors of a new study went about the question. They used the Helsinki cohort, which was started back in 1975 when, for a year, all of the children born in Helsinki were enrolled for a sample of 6,500 children. This study focuses on 3,600 children whose
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