College students may be misdiagnosed as personality disordered when in fact their problems are better explained by their upbringing. Growing up with a personality disordered parent may cause them to initially present with what appear to be personality disordered traits due to issues such as not learning adequate coping skills. Accurate diagnosis…

Co-teaching, the collaborative instruction of an inclusive classroom by a general education and special education teacher, is a relatively new construct. As a result, many of the pitfalls and struggles associated with it are still being defined, and solutions are often hard to come by. Disagreements, and especially large-scale personality…

Imagery rescripting is a powerful technique that can be successfully applied in the treatment of personality disorders. For personality disorders, imagery rescripting is not used to address intrusive images but to change the implicational meaning of schemas and childhood experiences that underlie the patient's problems. Various mechanisms that may…

Intrusive images occur in many disorders and, as well as causing distress, they frequently represent important negative meanings about the self, other people, or the world. Imagery rescripting describes a set of therapeutic techniques that are aimed at changing these negative meanings. This special series focuses on when and how to do imagery…

Recognizable symptoms and features of borderline personality disorder (BPD) appear during adolescence. However, there has been resistance to diagnose or research this disorder prior to adulthood because of clinical lore that BPD is a long-standing illness and that personality traits are not stable until adulthood. This has resulted in little…

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) presents a number of symptoms and adjustment issues for individuals, but it is also associated with a myriad of risks for the larger family system. A systemic perspective is crucial to comprehending the development of BPD. Promoting healthy relationships with one or more supportive adult enables the child to…

Recent publications in the "Journal of Youth and Adolescence" present a variety of topics exploring adolescents' mental functioning in the twenty first century. Conceptually, many of the articles address the intriguing, though rarely explicit, question of developmental continuities and change from adolescence to adulthood. Such…

There are ten identified personality disorders, broken into three clusters: A, B, and C. Individuals with a cluster B diagnosis may demonstrate marked displays of emotional instability, erratic and disruptive patterns around interpersonal relationships, a myopic and restricted range of affect, a pronounced lack of empathy and insight, barriers…

Students with severe and persistent mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders; moderate to severe mood, anxiety, dissociative, eating, or personality disorders) are attending community colleges in increasing numbers. Their need for counseling services presents counseling centers with unique ethical issues to consider. This…

Female offenders' mental health needs have consistently been shown to exceed those of male offenders. Incarcerated women report higher rates of violent victimization, major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, substance use disorders, and personality disorders. For years, researchers have examined the human-animal…

The neurobiology of borderline personality disorder (BPD) remains unclear. Dysfunctions of several neurobiological systems, including serotoninergic, dopaminergic, and other neurotransmitter systems, have been discussed. Here we present a theory that alterations in the sensitivity of opioid receptors or the availability of endogenous opioids…

Over the past several decades, research has focused increasingly on developmental precursors to psychological disorders that were previously assumed to emerge only in adulthood. This change in focus follows from the recognition that complex transactions between biological vulnerabilities and psychosocial risk factors shape emotional and behavioral…

The diagnostic categories of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders were developed in the spirit of a traditional medical model that considers mental disorders to be qualitatively distinct conditions (see, e.g., American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Work is now beginning on the fifth edition…

The revised Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI-R) is the third stage of development of a widely used multiscale personality inventory that began with the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and then the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). The author describes the third stage of the psychobiological theory of temperament and…

This article focuses on the possibility that autism spectrum disorder (ASD: Asperger syndrome, autism and atypical autism) in its milder forms may be clinically important among a substantial proportion of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and discusses OCD subtypes based on this proposition. The hypothesis derives from extensive…