THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY DISORDER The American Psychiatric Association diagnostic criteria (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

IN THE COURSE OF PATIENT CARE, a pharmacistwill provide services to thousands of patients, about 2 % of whom will have borderline personality characteristics. This proportion increases to approxi-mately 20 % for inpatient psychiatric settings.1 By the very nature of their psychopathology, many of those patients present with significant clinical management challenges in addition to their immediate medical needs. Some of those challenges are readily apparent at the outset of treatment, but others may not show up until later in the patient care process. Also, many central treatment issues are not clearly recognizable without knowledge of the underlying problem. It is therefore difficult, and sometimes impossible, to effectively manage these challenges unless the phar-macist understands the features of borderline person-ality and the common pitfalls in dealing with patients who have those characteristics