Splitting in schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder

It can be beautiful or destructive: Street-involved youth's perceptions of their romantic relationships and resilience

INTRODUCTION

This study examined romantic relationships among street-involved youth through the overlapping perspectives of resilience, attachment and social bonding. The main goal was to assess how youth understand their romantic attachment bonds as supporting or undermining resilience. While there are qualitative reports on how the social relationships of street-involved youth are linked to resilience, romantic relationships have yet to be differentiated with regard to resilience. This paper also builds on existing research by providing further information on the characteristics of their romantic relationships, and the impact of street life and risky behaviours within relationships.

METHODS

Twenty-one youth (11 men and 10 women) in shelters, in a Canadian metropolitan city, aged 16-24 years, participated in semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis of the data was conducted exploring how the youth understand their romantic attachments as well as their links in supporting or undermining resilience.

RESULTS

Results indicated that connection, support, validation, and encouragement within a relationship were of value to the youth's resilience, in the form of addressing drug use, achieving goals, supporting self-worth, and promoting positive coping. The youth also reported many negative experiences within their romantic relationships, including dating violence and the stress of street-life, which they saw as undermining their resilience. A key finding was that the youth had considerable difficulty integrating the positive and negative aspects of their relationships. Overall the findings highlight the co-occurrence of positive and negative romantic experiences, and support the importance of developing healthy relationship programs for street-involved youth. Key words: street-involved; homeless; youth; romantic relationship; resilience; dating violence.

Social Cognition and Borderline Personality Disorder: Splitting and Trust Impairment Findings

The Borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis has its origins in the concept of borderline personality organization (BPO). BPO is rooted in psychoanalytic object relations theory (ORT) which conceptualizes BPD and BPO to exhibit a propensity to view significant others as either idealized or persecutory (splitting) and a trait-like paranoid view of interpersonal relations. From the ORT model, those with BPD think that they will ultimately be betrayed, abandoned, or neglected by significant others, despite periodic idealizations. This article synthesizes the extant literature splitting and trust impairments in BPD, identifies avenues for further investigation, and discusses the relative promise of different methods to evaluate these clinical processes.