Effect of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder on Adolescents’ Experience of Maltreatment and Adolescent Borderline Features

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a severe mental illness characterized by dysfunction and instability across a variety of domains including interpersonal relations, behavior, emotion, and cognitions. The current study assessed maltreatment in the adolescent offspring of mothers’ with BPD, who may be more at risk for experiencing maltreatment compared to adolescents who do not have a mother with the disorder. Participants were adolescents age 14-18 years (M = 15.78, SD = 1.21) who were a part of a larger study examining offspring of mothers with BPD. Groups were divided into adolescents whose mothers’ were diagnosed with BPD (n = 28) compared to adolescents whose mother did not have the disorder (n = 28). Adolescent offspring of mothers with BPD experienced more maltreatment overall, more physical abuse, more neglect, more emotional abuse, but not more sexual abuse compared to controls. Those who were sexually abused had higher borderline features of self-harm compared to emotionally abused, neglected, and non-maltreated adolescents. Adolescents who were physically abused reported higher affective instability compared to adolescents who were not maltreated. Additionally, dimensions of maltreatment including severity, multiple subtypes of abuse, and chronicity of abuse were related to borderline features of affective instability, self-harm, and total borderline features. The results conclude with a discussion of the empirical and clinical implications of a developmental understanding of the effect that maltreatment has on borderline personality features in adolescents whose mothers have the disorder.