Criteria Guide
Borderline Personality Disorder DSM Criteria Guide
Use this page when the goal is to focus quickly on the DSM-style structure for Borderline Personality Disorder.
Main diagnosis page
Return to the full Borderline Personality Disorder pillar page.
Criterion A
- A pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, with marked impulsivity, begins by early adulthood and is present across contexts.
Criterion B
- At least 5 of the following features are present.
Criterion B feature list
- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
- Identity disturbance, including markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
- Impulsivity in at least 2 areas that are potentially self-damaging, such as spending, sex, substance use, reckless driving, or binge eating.
- Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
- Affective instability due to marked reactivity of mood.
- Chronic feelings of emptiness.
- Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.
- Transient stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.