A Screening Measure for BPD: The McLean Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder (MSI-BPD)

• Published in: Journal of personality disorders Vol. 17; no. 6; pp. 568 - 573
• Main Authors: Zanarini, Mary C., Vujanovic, A. Anna, Parachini, Elizabeth A., Boulanger, Jennifer L., Frankenburg, Frances R., Hennen, John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY Guilford 01.12.2003; Guilford Press
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Biological and medical sciences; Borderline Personality Disorder - diagnosis; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Female; High School Graduates; Humans; Logistic Models; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Personality; Personality Problems; Psychological Tests; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychometrics. Diagnostic aid systems; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reproducibility of Results; Sensitivity and Specificity; Surveys and Questionnaires; Techniques and methods; United States; United States; Human; Test validation; Borderline; Evaluation scale; Psychometrics; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV; Medical screening; Test reliability; Personality disorder
• ISSN: 0885-579X; 1943-2763
• DOI: 10.1521/pedi.17.6.568.25355

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common psychiatric disorder that is often overlooked in treatment settings. This report describes the validation of a new self-report screening measure for DSM-IV BPD--the McLean Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder (MSI-BPD). Two hundred subjects with treatment histories whose ages ranged from 18 to 59 filled out the MSI-BPD. Each subject was then interviewed, blind to MSI-BPD results, with the BPD module of the Diagnostic Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders (DIPD-IV; Zanarini, Frankenburg, Sickel, & Yong, 1996). Of these 200 subjects, 139 (69.5%) met DSM-IV criteria for BPD as assessed by the BPD module of the DIPD-IV and the remaining 61 subjects (30.5%) did not. Using logistic regression analyses, an MSI-BPD cutoff of 7 or more of the measure's 10 items was judged to be the best cutoff. This was so because it yielded both good sensitivity (.81; percentage of correctly identified cases) and specificity (.85; percentage of correctly identified noncases) for the diagnosis of DSM-IV BPD. For younger subjects, diagnostic efficiency was even greater. For example, sensitivity was .90 and specificity was .93 at a cutoff of 7 for the 63 subjects who were 25 years old or younger. The results of this study suggest that the MSI-BPD may be a useful screening instrument for the presence of DSM-IV borderline personality disorder.