Abstract
Your goal as a psychopharmacologist for patients with BPD and medical comorbidities such as Maria’s is to help make the link between physical symptoms, need for relief and caretaking, and interpersonal and emotional difficulties at the core of BPD. Helping her understand the psychological drivers of her pain and her poor self-care is a critical element in structuring her treatment and your role within it. She comes to you as a passive victim of circumstance, asking for more help with “getting rid of the pain.” You work toward that goal by helping her become more active, more accountable, and more engaged in building a richer life for herself outside of being a chronic medical patient. At the same time, it is unrealistic to expect that her physical ailments will completely dissipate, or that she will easily be able to improve her management of them. Steady attention, repetition, and close coordination with her PCP are all the important elements in your treatment.
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Brickell, C. (2018). Medical Comorbidities. In: Palmer, B., Unruh, B. (eds) Borderline Personality Disorder. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90743-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90743-7_10
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