Neural paths for borderline personality disorder
People prone to stormy social lives display brain activity that may prompt oversensitivity to emotion and an inability to resolve conflicting information
By Bruce Bower
People diagnosed with the mental ailment known as borderline personality disorder hemorrhage emotion. Real or perceived rejections, losses or even minor slights trigger depression and other volatile reactions that can lead to suicide.
New brain-imaging research suggests that in people with borderline personality disorder, specific neural circuits foster extreme emotional oversensitivity and an inability to conceive of other people as having both positive and negative qualities.
Psychiatrist Harold Koenigsberg of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City described his team’s results January 17 in New York City at the winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
“I suspect that in social situations, people with this disorder activate the brain in unique ways,” Koenigsberg says.