Bordeline personality disorder
aThough experts disagree on its exact nature, causes, and treatment, borderline personality disorder is recognized as a major mental-health problem in America today. About six million people are afflicted with BPD in North America, as many as suffer from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder combined; all told, BPD sufferers make up 20 percent of the inpatients and 11 percent of the outpatients in the mental-health system, according to the Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill. ... Stern used the term to describe a group of patients whose problems did not fall neatly into the primary diagnostic classifications of "neuroses" (mental disorders characterized by feelings of anxiety, depression, and insecurity) or "psychoses" (more severe disorders characterized by derangement of personality and a loss of contact with reality). ... Even with breakthrough work by psychoanalysts Otto Kernberg in the 1960s and John Gunderson in the 1970s, the disorder eluded widespread recognition for more than four decades.