Brief hospital treatment plans for persons with borderline personality disorder: perspectives of inpatient psychiatric nurses and community mental health center clinicians.

Despite growing recognition of the challenges inherent in helping persons with borderline personality disorder, systematic investigation of caring for this population in specific treatment situations is lacking. In this study, an innovative hospital treatment program for persons with borderline personality disorder was evaluated. Using an interpretive phenomenological approach, a team of researchers analyzed data from in-depth, individual interviews with inpatient psychiatric nurses and community mental health center clinicians (n = 13) and thereby identified a constitutive pattern, the paradoxes of helping. At a time when innovation in caring for persons with this disorder is sought, an examination of these paradoxes will help identify those practices to be abandoned, those to be extended, and those to be preserved.