Compliance in the treatment of borderline personality disorders

Abstract

Compliance is a complex behavior, ranging from minor instances of treatment refusal to the inappropriate use of health services or even treatment abandonment. The study comprises a qualitative analysis of six patients with borderline personality disorder submitted to an open interview, a psychosocial questionnaire, a diagnostic classification through SCDII and II and a clinical follow-up. Six behaviors made treatment compliance either difficult or impossible: impulsivity, manipulation, affective dissociation, attempted suicide, tendency to regression, and aggression. The participants who abandoned the treatment made the health team impotent, requiring social strategies to manage the situation. We hypothesized that healthy families are of great importance for compliance to treatment. For the cases in which treatment was not abandoned, non-compliance was manifested as attacks against the bonds and against the improvement, and aggression towards the health team and the institution.