Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Test

Borderline personality disorder, or BPD,  is a mental health condition in which a person experiences extreme emotions, intense challenges with self-esteem, and difficulty forming strong, stable relationships with others. Teenagers with BPD are often angry, impulsive, and quick to believe that other people have wronged them. 

Young people with BPD often harm themselves, and they have a high risk of suicide. Symptoms of BPD usually show up in the teenage years. Early treatment can help people with BPD manage the disorder better.

If you’re looking for a free BPD test, you can use our Symptom Checker to help you determine if your child might have BPD. 

When you answer a few simple questions about your child’s behaviors, you’ll receive a more specific list of behaviors. If they correspond with the symptoms associated with BPD, it will let you know. If your answers to the quiz suggest another disorder, you’ll see that, too.

Only a mental health professional can diagnose borderline personality disorder. But if you’re looking for an online BPD test, our Symptom Checker can help you know if the behaviors you notice in your child could be signs of BPD or something else.

The Symptom Checker was developed in partnership with expert clinicians and is aligned with the Child Mind Institute’s rigorous editorial standards and the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5).

You’ll also find links to articles where you can learn more and help you prepare for a conversation with a mental health professional who can diagnose your child.

Symptoms of BPD include: 

• Unrealistic or unstable sense of self 
• Believing you’re worthless 
• Regularly feeling angry, empty, or hopeless 
• Mood swings  
• Finding it hard to control emotions, especially anger 
• Brief, intense periods of anxiety or depression 
• Fear of being abandoned and making desperate attempts to avoid it  
• Paranoid thinking 
• Quickly changing from loving or admiring someone to disliking or criticizing them  
• Impulsive behavior, such as risky driving, unsafe sex, or alcohol and substance abuse 
• Self-harm 
• Attempting suicide 

Experts view BPD as a combination of two factors.

The first is being highly sensitive or reactive — having a tendency to get upset very easily. This is a matter of the temperament you are born with. And once a powerful emotion is triggered, it takes kids with BPD longer to return to their emotional baseline.

The second is growing up in a household that doesn’t help kids learn to handle big emotions. Even the most well-meaning parents may dismiss a child’s feelings as inappropriate or over-the-top.  For highly reactive kids, the chronic sense of not feeling understood or supported leads them to feel isolated and disconnected. 

Minor slights — or things misinterpreted as slights — are taken as evidence of abandonment, and the reaction can be swift and intense, causing rifts with friends and parents.

Without the skills to manage painful feelings in a more effective way, kids with BPD  often find unhealthy alternatives, including substance abuse, risky sex, self-injury, and reckless thrill-seeking.

A mental health professional must diagnose BPD. To be diagnosed with BPD, a person must have at least five of the symptoms listed above by the time they’re a young adult. 

A diagnostic evaluation by a mental health professional usually includes the use of screening questionnaires and structured clinical interviews.

BPD screeners include:

• McLean Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder (MSI-BPD)
• Borderline Symptom List (BSL-23 or BSL-95)

Structured clinical interviews include:

• Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 Personality Disorders (SCID-5-PD)
• International Personality Disorder Examination (IPDE)
• Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines — Revised (DIB-R)

The best treatment for BPD isdialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), which was developed to treat it. DBT teaches patients skills to manage their emotions without self-destructive and other dangerous behavior. It’s called “dialectical” because it’s about learning to balance two things that seem like opposites: the need for acceptance of your feelings and the need for change in how you cope with them. 

In between therapy sessions, DBT therapists are available to patients by telephone to help them use the skills they’ve learned to manage difficult situations without resorting to harmful behavior, including suicide attempts. Long-term studies show that DBT works well for kids and teens with BPD.  

There are no medications to treat BPD. However, medication can sometimes help specific symptoms of BPD, including depression, impulsive behavior, and anxiety. 

Teens with BPD who are in danger of attempting suicide are sometimes hospitalized for treatment.  

BPD is driven by fear of abandonment and emotional instability, while narcissistic personality disorder revolves around a sense of superiority, grandiosity, and entitlement.

While kids with BPD struggle with deep emotional pain and unstable identity, people with histrionic personality disorder crave attention and are overly emotionally expressive. 

BPD involves emotional pain and fear of being alone, while antisocial personality disorder involves a  selfish and irresponsible behavior that shows a lack of regard for the rights of others. 

Whereas people with BPD cling to relationships but struggle with instability, those with avoidant personality disorder withdraw from others to avoid rejection. BPD is marked by emotional extremes and impulsivity, while dependent personality disorder is about having difficulty making decisions and depending on others for support.