Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a serious mental disorder, often beginning in adolescence. BPD has many distressing symptoms including unstable moods, impulsive behaviours, problematic relationships, self-harm, and suicide attempts. Despite being relatively common during this period, adolescent BPD only recently received widespread recognition (Winsper et al., 2016). Therefore, little is known about the early causes of the disorder, and there are no targeted early intervention services in the UK.

This project forms part of a larger programme of work to increase our understanding of the biological and environmental causes of adolescent BPD. An understanding of how genetic and environmental effects may combine to increase risk of adolescent BPD could help inform prevention and early intervention approaches to prevent long-term illness.