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Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering. Borderlines are the patients psychologists fear most. As many as 75% hurt themselves, and approximately 10% commit suicide. Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously. They are powerfully connected to the people close to them and terrified by the possibility of losing them—yet attack those people so unexpectedly that they often ensure the very abandonment they fear. When they want to hold, they claw instead.

No one knows exactly what causes BPD, but the familiar nature-nurture combination of genetic and environmental misfortune is the likely culprit. University of Washington psychologist Marsha Linehan, one of the world's leading experts on BPD, has found that some borderline individuals come from homes where they were abused, and some from normal families under the stress of an economic or health-care crisis and failed to provide kids with adequate validation and emotional coaching. "The child does not learn how to understand, label, regulate or tolerate emotional responses, and instead learns to oscillate between emotional inhibition and extreme emotional lability," Linehan and her colleagues write in a paper.

And yet diagnosis of the condition appears to be on the rise. There are several explanations. A parsimonious explanation is that because of advances in treating common mood problems like short-term depression, more health-care resources are available to identify difficult disorders like BPD. Another explanation is hopeful: BPD treatment has improved dramatically in the past few years. Therapeutic advances have changed the landscape. Researchers have conducted at least 17 randomized trials of various psychotherapies for borderline illness, and most have shown encouraging results.

Still, the rise in borderline diagnoses may illustrate something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear, it was anxiety. During the 60s and 70s, it was an age of suspicion and Watergate. In the 90s, after serotonin-manipulating drugs were released and so many patients were listening to Prozac, thousands of news stories suggested, incorrectly, that the problem of chronic depression had been finally solved. Whether driven by scary headlines, popular movies or just pharmacological faddishness, the decade and the disorder do tend to find each other.

So, is borderline the illness of our age? When so many of us are clawing to keep homes and paychecks, might we have become more sensitized to other kinds of desperation? In a world so uncertain, maybe it's natural to lose one's emotional skin. It's too soon to tell if that's the case, but BPD does have at least one thing in common with the recession. As Dr. Allen Frances, a former chair of the Duke psychiatry department, has written, "Everyone talks about [BPD] , but it usually seems that no one knows quite what to do about it."

6. Which of the following is true according to Paragraph 1?

[A] A gentle touch on a BPD patient will bring him great pain.

[B] 10% of the people who commit suicide are BPD patients.

[C] BPD patients cannot regulate their own emotions.

[D] BPD patients are always abandoned by their families.

7. Linehan and her colleagues may believe that______.

[A] children need to be taught to control their emotions

[B] some children are born with genes of BPD

[C] it's hard for children to keep a stable emotional state

[D] most of the BPD patients are from poor families

8. The number of people diagnosed with BPD increases because______.

[A] some difficult mood problems are classified as BPD

[B] the increased medical experience makes BPD identification easier

[C] the improved BPD treatment encourages more people to go to hospital

[D] more and more psychiatrists devote themselves to BPD study

9. It can be inferred from Paragraph 4 that______.

[A] people have suffered from mental illnesses for a long time

[B] people have experienced various kinds of hardships

[C] people of the same age tend to have the same illness

[D] every age is featured by a particular mental disease

10. It is implied in the last paragraph that______.

[A] the BPD in our age is related to heavy living pressures

[B] BPD is a natural consequence of social development

[C] people are insensitive to the problem of BPD

[D] people feel disappointed with the medical development